


brave boy

by rooonil_waazlib



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, Stucky Big Bang 2017, Witness Protection AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 10:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 37,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11849337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rooonil_waazlib/pseuds/rooonil_waazlib
Summary: “CHORUS: Brave girl.KASSANDRA: People never say that to a lucky person, do they?”-"Agamemnon", Aeschylus (trans. Anne Carson)-Steve’s always wanted to see Madrid: to have the chance to wander through Retiro Park; to explore the Museo del Prado and the Royal Palace and the Reina Sofía; maybe to light a candle at the Almudena Cathedral; to drink wine and eat tapas at all hours of the night and go dancing until the sun comes up, just once or twice.Never in his entire life had he expected it might happen this way, though: a terrible memory ground into his brain; a scar the size of his fist knotted over his shoulder; his friends convinced he’s dead; his hair dyed dark; and a bodyguard next to him that’s pretending to be his new husband.





	1. Away

**Author's Note:**

> The art for this is done by the incredible [kissuru](http://kissuru.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Betas, who I am intensely grateful for, are [Young](http://boksoonghwa.tumblr.com/) and [News](http://newsbypostcard.tumblr.com/).
> 
> And my name is Carmen and you can find me [here](http://rooonil-waazlib.tumblr.com/).

Steve’s always wanted to see Madrid: to have the chance to wander through Retiro Park; to explore the Museo del Prado and the Royal Palace and the Reina Sofía; maybe to light a candle at the Almudena Cathedral; to drink wine and eat tapas at all hours of the night and go dancing until the sun comes up, just once or twice.

Never in his entire life had he expected it might happen this way, though: a terrible memory ground into his brain; a scar the size of his fist knotted over his shoulder; his friends convinced he’s dead; his hair dyed dark; and a bodyguard next to him that’s pretending to be his new husband.

Of course, Steve had never expected to be so desperate for a coffee that he’d walked into a money-laundering front for a Hydra terrorist cell the very day that SHIELD had raided them and caused in several deaths. He’d never expected to take a bullet, or for there to be six screws and two plates holding his collarbone together and a lump where the bullet is still lodged in his muscle. He’d never expected his own funeral to be faked so he could be put into SHIELD’s Witness Protection Program and forced to go on vacation until trial. He’d never expected that protection to come in the form of a man as attractive as the one he’s currently sitting next to.

But—well—here he is, on the 10:05 overnight from JFK to Barajas.

At least his drinks are paid for.

He accepts the champagne the flight attendant passes him and takes a sip, turning to look out the window. It’s ironic that he’s jetting away from his entire life—his friends, his business, his mother—and drinking champagne while he does it, like it’s a celebration.

There’s nothing to be seen outside: black as pitch and no stars. Instead he can only see his own reflection in the plexiglass. That, and the reflection of his faux-husband, looking at him.

For a second Steve closes his eyes and just breathes, collecting as much strength as he can with each inhale. Finally, he takes another sip of bubbly—cheap, but fizzy and alcoholic, which is just about all he needs right at this moment—and settles back in his seat.

“So,” he says. “Sergeant Barnes.”

“Jesus, don’t call me that,” his protector says. He’s drinking a ginger ale, and it looks like Steve’s champagne, blonde and sparkly in his plastic cup. “Call me whatever you want, but we’re supposed to be in love, remember?”

Steve sighs. “Fine. What would you like me to call you, love of my life? Fire of my loins?”

Sergeant Barnes laughs; Steve tries not to smile, too. It feels weird, to be smiling right now, literally flying away from everything he knows, like he should be mourning and not making jokes. He feels like he hasn’t done it in days. “I mean, most people call me Bucky.”

“You mean you don’t want to be called Fire of My Loins?” Sergeant Barnes gives Steve a look, barely amused; and so Steve gives a dramatic sigh and shrugs. “Fine, fine. Your loss…Bucky.”

Days ago, he’d been given a file on Sergeant Barnes—he wants you to call him Bucky, his brain supplies helpfully, what a goddamn ridiculous name; he knows what it sounds like, right?—so he could be prepared. Twenty-eight, a Brooklyn boy born and raised. Honorably discharged from the Special Forces after the loss of his arm and its replacement with a cutting-edge Stark Industries prosthesis.

In return, he’d filled out a basic survey of his own: full name Steven Grant Rogers, born July 4th in County Cork, Ireland, son of Sarah and Joseph; raised in Red Hook; twenty-six years old; owner of a tattoo parlor in Carroll Heights; best friends Sam Wilson and Tony Stark.

“You ever been to Madrid before?” Bucky asks, thumbing the button on his armrest and reclining his seat.

Steve shakes his head. “Never. You?”

Splaying himself a little lower into his seat, Bucky’s knee rests against Steve’s. Their shoulders are pressed together; neither of them is really of a small enough size to fit in a pair of coach seats. “Yeah, a couple of times on leave.” He grins at Steve, his face transformed into something warm and flirtatious. This—pretending to be madly in love—well, it might be easier than Steve had expected. “There are so many romantic spots to show you.” He picks up Steve’s hand, laces their fingers together, and kisses his knuckles. “Love you.”

Steve goes violently red in the face, his skin actually hot with it. Bucky seems to almost raise an eyebrow, but doesn’t; behind his perfect loving mask Steve can see him thinking, say something, say something, we’re supposed to be in love, you moron. Steve clears his throat. “Love you too,” he mumbles, quick and under his breath.

“We’ll have to work on that.” Bucky rests his head back against the seat, still holding Steve’s hand. Rubbing his thumb over Steve’s shiny new wedding band, he shifts and resettles his shoulders and rolls his head so he’s staring across at Steve. For several seconds, he studies him, his left hand—the prosthetic, looking just like a regular arm—tapping at the far armrest. “You’re into guys, right?”

That had, in fact, been one of the questions on the survey—men or women? Steve had checked both. He nods, mirroring Bucky’s posture so their heads are tilted together a bit. “I mean. Anyone, really. I’m not…” he hesitates for a second, realizing as he does that he’s still blushing and showing no sign of stopping, “well. I’m picky, but like. About people’s personalities. Not about—y’know…their fun parts.” He considers asking what Bucky’s into, but it seems like prying, so he stays quiet.

Bucky gives half a smile and nods. For a moment, he looks at Steve’s face; then he sits up, dropping Steve’s hand and grabbing the small toiletries kit he’d pulled out of his bag before stuffing it into the overhead bin. Unzipping it, he pulls out two unopened packs of earplugs and holds one out to Steve. “You should get some rest,” he says, passing over a sleep mask too. “We’ll only be on this plane for another five hours, and I have plans once we get there.”

Ignoring Bucky’s wink, Steve takes the proffered items. “Thanks.” He fiddles with the earplugs, rolling the foam so they’ll expand in his ear canals, and watches from the corner of his eyes as Bucky bunks in.

“See you in Madrid,” Bucky says, softly, and leans over to kiss Steve’s cheek. “G’night, sugar pie.”

 

It’s almost lunchtime when they arrive at the safehouse, a discreet place near Puerta de Álcala with a cage elevator that takes them up to the seventh floor with a lot of rattling. Bucky grabs Steve’s hand again as he knocks on the door, glancing over when Steve tenses up and giving him another look. He leans in, close enough that his lips brush against Steve’s ear, and Steve goes scarlet as the door swings open on a young woman.

“We’re supposed to be on our honeymoon,” Bucky breathes. The woman is smiling sunnily at them.

“Ah, you must be Grant and James,” she says. “Come in.”

Bucky continues holding Steve’s hand while the woman—Elisa, she calls herself—walks them around the tiny place. It takes about three minutes: kitchen and dining room and den all rolled into one biggish space, bedroom, bathroom. There’s a small balcony off the dining area, just large enough for two chairs and a little round table, a window box hanging off the railing filled with bright pink flowers and a clothesline on a pulley trailing across the courtyard to the balcony on the other side. She shows them how to work the coffeemaker, sets a pot on to brew.

Leaving a map of the area on the kitchen table, Elisa slings a backpack over her shoulder on her way out; and suddenly, they’re alone. Immediately, Steve drops Bucky’s hand and grabs his bag to unpack.

He doesn’t notice that Bucky hasn’t moved for several seconds, not until he’s kneeling in front of his suitcase and unzipping it. He glances up to find Bucky watching him, hands stuck into his pockets, looking thoughtful, and he feels his cheeks going red again.

“Um?” Steve says, and Bucky blinks and turns away.

“Sorry. I was…just thinking.” Bucky grabs his own duffel and tosses it onto the bed, queen-sized, Steve thinks. “We should—I’ll sleep on the couch, yeah? But I’ll unload my stuff into the right side of the dresser. You can have the left-hand drawers.”

“Oh—” Steve looks from the bed to Bucky to the bed—“You can have the bed, if you want. I can…y’know. You’re here for me, so—um—you should be comfortable.”

Bucky shrugs a shoulder as he pulls a pile of t-shirts from his bag. “We’ll figure it out later,” he says.

They finish unpacking in silence. By the time Steve shoves his empty suitcase under the bed, he’s sort of half-forgotten why he’s here, and he straightens up and digs in his pocket for his phone. “I should call my mom, let her know that I got here safe,” he says, and then, suddenly—your mother thinks you’re dead, his brain mutters.

The next thing he knows, Bucky’s pushing him into a seat on the balcony. “Jesus, kid, breathe,” he says, pressing on the back of Steve’s neck until he puts his head between his knees. “Breathe, and I’ll go get you some water.”

Gripping two vertical railing support bars in his fists, Steve tries to calm himself. It’s no big deal, okay, just his whole life being literally over. He’s not Steve Rogers anymore; instead he’s Grant Stephens, who’s on his honeymoon with a man he barely knows, who can’t speak to any of his friends or family, and who’s having a panic attack on his very first day in Spain.

He swallows hard and sits up just as Bucky steps back onto the balcony, and takes the glass of water Bucky passes over. When he doesn’t drink right away, Bucky reaches out and nudges him as he takes the other seat. “Drink,” he orders, so Steve does, quick sips until the glass is empty. Bucky takes it back, puts it down on the table. “Better?”

“A bit,” Steve says. He doesn’t know how to quantify the ‘better’ he’s feeling, which is just enough to relax the band squeezing his chest, but not enough to stop the tears that continue to form and spill over onto his cheeks. Wiping his face, he sniffs. It doesn’t do much good; he’s still crying. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Bucky reaches out to rub at Steve’s shoulder again. “You’ve given up your entire life, and not because you wanted to.” Steve swallows and doesn’t look at him. “Steve. Listen.” His chair scrapes a little as he tries to shift closer. “This won’t be easy. You’ll need to be strong, okay, because you can’t go back, not yet.” Steve turns to glare at him, because this is just about the least inspiring pep talk he’s ever heard. But Bucky just stares back, seemingly unfazed, and squeezes his shoulder. “But I’m here to help you.”

Steve gulps again and nods a bit, wiping his mouth and nose on his sleeve. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

“That’s it,” Bucky says, his voice gentle like the sea at low tide. “Breathe in, yeah, good, like that—and out. Let me get you some more water.”

What Bucky returns with isn’t water, though, but coffee. “I thought this might make you feel a bit better,” he says, setting it on the table next to Steve and nudging it forward with the backs of his fingers. “You had it black on the plane.”

When Steve looks up at him, Bucky narrows his eyes thoughtfully, takes the other seat again. “Thanks,” Steve manages, picking up the mug and cupping his hands around it. It’s really hot, and although he’s comfortable on this shaded balcony, Steve thinks he wouldn’t be able to drink it if he were sitting in the sun.

Across from him, Bucky sips his own coffee. “Tell me about your ma.”

Steve looks down into his mug. He hasn’t drunk any yet. What is he supposed to say about his mother? “She and my dad moved us to New York when I was six. She’s a nurse, which was good because I was sick a lot as a kid.” He takes a deep breath, trying to push the wobbly parts of himself back into line. “I was nine when my dad died. After that we never had much, and she worked all the time—but she always did the best she could. I’m—” his throat tightens, and he swallows, tears blurring his vision again—“I’m all she has. Had. And now I’m gone too.”

It’s several minutes before he manages to get himself under control. When he finally does, he sits back in his seat and glances across at Bucky, who’s looking at him with half of a sad smile on his mouth. “What?” Steve asks.

“Did you know you slip into an Irish accent when you talk about her?” Bucky asks. “It’s—you really miss her, huh?”

He doesn’t quite know how to explain himself. Of course he does. “It’s just been the two of us for so long, you know? I—we take care of each other. That’s what we do.” He blinks at the brown depths of his coffee. “What we did.”

His stomach hurts to think of his mom in that little place in Red Hook where he’d grown up, alone to clean out the stuff he’s been storing there for the last ten years. “You’ll get back to her, Steve,” Bucky says. “I promise, I’ll get you back to her.”

 

“How are you feeling?” Bucky asks, nearly half an hour later. He’s hunched over the map that Elisa had left them, marking spots in pencil. They’ve been sitting in silence for almost twenty minutes. Steve’s glad for it; he doesn’t feel like he has more words to describe how he’s feeling, not right now, and he doesn’t know if he’d want to say them even if he did. Bucky’s not his therapist, just his bodyguard. It wouldn’t be fair to put that on him.

Steve’s gotten most of the way through his coffee. Swallowing, he nods a little. “Alright,” he says. It’s not quite a lie, although it’s not entirely true, either. His belly still feels wobbly, but he’s gotten his breath under control and he doesn’t think he’s going to start crying again.

Bucky sits up and inspects Steve’s face. He must pass muster, because after a moment he nods and folds up the map. “Will you be okay if I go for a walk?”

Clearing his throat, Steve sits up. “Oh, um, sure,” he says.

“You can’t come with me,” Bucky says, fiddling with a frayed corner of the map. “I need you to stay here until I can check in with a couple of people. You’ll be safe—there are people keeping an eye on us nearby.”

Steve tries to tell himself he hadn’t been about to ask to go along, and knows he’s lying. “Okay. Should I—is there anything I can do to help?”

For a second Bucky looks at him, putting on what Steve is learning is his thinking-face. “I’d ask you to get some food started, but there isn’t much in this place. Elisa said she’d only been here a few hours to make sure everything was clean and the locks were new,” he says. “I’ll pick something up on my way back. Just—you could get settled. We’ll be here for a while, so you should make yourself at home.”

So while Bucky’s gone, Steve does that. All of the open windows and the balcony face out over the courtyard, and through them he can hear people seeming to go about their lives. It’s surreal to consider that there are people who can do that while he sits in here, taking a break from his own, like it’s a movie he’d put on pause and wandered away from. Briefly, he thinks he hears Bucky’s voice speaking Spanish, but by the time he gets to the window and looks down into the courtyard, there’s only an old lady having a cigarette.

Once all of his toiletries are unpacked, his sketchbooks lined up on the dresser, Steve shoves his backpack under the bed and heads back onto the balcony with his phone, which, he discovers very quickly, won’t find a network. All of the wifi networks around are password-protected, and deep down he knows he wouldn’t be able to use any of his social media anyway. The first thing Bucky had done when they met was take his phone, change all of his passwords, and install some kind of app that keeps it undiscoverable.

It’s logical, of course. He’s got to be kept safe. But it makes Steve want to throw something.

 

Bucky finally returns with several bags slung over his left arm. With a grunt he deposits it all on the dining table, then turns to Steve and wiggles his fingers. They make a whirring, clicking sound like they’re recalibrating. It’s a bit unnerving, because it still looks like a flesh-and-bone thing. “Good for some stuff, at least,” Bucky says with a half-grin. “How’d you manage while I was out?”

Shrugging, Steve flips his sketchbook closed and gets up to poke through one of the bags. It’s full of groceries, which he begins to unpack while Bucky starts on another bag. “Did you do everything you had to?” he asks instead of getting into how stir-crazy he already is, or asking to see what the arm looks like for real.

“Yep,” Bucky says, and Steve had thought that he might explain—but instead he just whistles as he slides the eggs into the fridge. After a minute or two, filled with Bucky’s tuneless rendition of Call Me Maybe while they finish unloading groceries, he turns, leans on one of the dining chairs and says, “I thought we might go for a walk, get a bite to eat maybe. It’s still lunchtime.”

 

They stuff themselves into seats at the back of a tiny restaurant a few blocks from the safehouse. Bucky insists on sitting with his back to the wall and leans in, pretending to sneak a kiss while he outlines an exit strategy in Steve’s ear. Finally he sits back, surveying Steve’s red face with an amused smirk before he sits up again, this time not quite as close. “So tell me about your friends,” he says. “Sam and Tony, right? Are they your only friends, or have you got any others you’re hiding?”

It’s sort of disconcerting, talking to Bucky while their faces are so close together, even though Steve knows they have to look like they’re on their honeymoon, and they can’t be overheard talking about Steve’s old life. “Um. Yeah—you know—there’s Sam’s boyfriend, Riley, and Tony’s got—y’know, he’s got Pepper, so I’m not—plus I’ve got, you know, Helen and Thor at the shop—”

“Wait, okay, first of all, I was kidding, you don’t have to list off every single friend you have,” Bucky interrupts, waving a hand around, “but—you’re not talking about Tony Stark, are you?”

Steve clears his throat. “I mean. Yeah. It said so on my—I wrote it on my form thing.”

“I thought it said Tony Stank,” Bucky says, and snorts. “I remember thinking how unfortunate that name was. Jesus. You’re friends with Tony fucking Stark. How does that even happen?”

Honestly Steve’s not exactly sure himself. “He was a client, at first,” he explains. “And then, I don’t know—he took me out for drinks one afternoon after a session.”

Bucky spins his water glass on the table and wiggles the fingers of his prosthetic hand. It makes that motor noise again. “Stark Industries made me this,” he says. “It was Tony Stark’s pet project, so I’ve met him a handful of times. He never invited me for drinks, though.”

“He’s,” Steve starts, but he’s not sure how to explain Tony. “He gets distracted, is all, and as much as it doesn’t seem like he’d mind, he doesn’t like it when people listen to him too hard. He’s better when he thinks you’re not paying so much attention, but if you’re—y’know, focused on him—he goes all shifty. I’ve never heard him talk as much as while I was working on his tattoo.” He picks up a slick-looking nut from the small dish on their table and inspects it before popping it into his mouth. It’s an almond, he thinks, though it’s white and skinless, fried in olive oil and salted. It’s divine, and he realizes suddenly that he’s starving.

Bucky orders for the both of them, and Steve had been right; he does speak Spanish. It sounds good in his mouth, shapes his lips in a particularly beautiful way. This is not the first time that the urge to draw him takes Steve. Instead he looks away, turning his head to look over his shoulder and inspect the restaurant briefly.

By the time he turns back around, Bucky’s sipping a beer; there’s another in front of Steve, the glass frosted. “What about Sam?” Bucky asks. “What’s he like? Rich and brilliant, too?”

Steve grins. Tony would preen at that description. “Sam’s a paramedic. Former Air Force, actually.”

“How’d you meet him? Tattoos, too?”

“No.” Steve leans back as their waiter sets down a plate of fresh, tart-smelling salad in front of each of them. “No, Sam and I were roommates our freshman year in college.”

“George Washington, right?” Steve nods, watching Bucky use a piece of bread to fold a lettuce leaf. “And the rest is history?”

“And the rest is history,” Steve agrees. He takes his first bite of the salad; it’s a simple thing, lettuce and tuna and white asparagus and hard-boiled egg, but it’s crisp and its flavor is sharp on his tongue. His stomach yowls, and he stuffs another big leaf into his mouth before speaking again. “Sam—and Riley—they just moved up to New York last year to be closer to Sam’s mom. They’d been living in DC, but Sam grew up in Greenwich Village.”

Bucky stops asking questions while they eat, and Steve’s glad for it: after the salad comes a dish of breaded ovular balls full of cheese and potato and meat, and a dish of fried green peppers that look spicy but aren’t, and a dish of garlicky prawns that they have to peel with their hands. His mouth is far too occupied to speak, except to try and pronounce the names of their food.

 

They take a good long walk after lunch, to the park and through it. They don’t talk much, except for Bucky to point out sights. He hooks his hand around Steve’s elbow; Steve kicks a few rocks along the sidewalk and tries to imagine that this is a normal date. They stop for coffee a few blocks from the apartment, but Steve’s still a wreck by eight o’clock that evening. Bucky makes dinner rather than making him stay up until any restaurants are open. He slouches low on the sofa and watches listlessly as Bucky rinses the last of the dishes.

After a couple minutes, he slips down until he’s lying across the couch, his right arm gathered to his chest the way he can’t help himself doing ever since the shooting. It’s ecstasy. He’s not sure he’s ever felt so good, really; he lets his eyes slip closed and drifts, listening to the sink and the clattering of dishes and Bucky’s off-tune humming.

It’s been a while since he’s been domestic with anyone; he’d forgotten how much he enjoys the white noise of another human nearby. He rides the wave of it, settling, and he’s not sure how much time passes before a gentle hand shakes him awake.

Stirring, he struggles and finally manages to pull open his eyes. It’s dark in the place; all but one of the shades has been drawn, and the last bit of late sun leaves a fat gold stripe on the bedroom door. Bucky leans over him and runs a hand through his hair. Does Steve shift into it, butting his head into Bucky’s palm like a cat? Or does he dream that, too?

“What do you think, bedtime?” he asks. “You want some water or something?”

Steve swallows and sits up a little. “Yeah—yeah, please,” he says, and while Bucky walks away he rights himself. “Thanks for—y’know—thanks for dinner.”

“All part of the job.” Bucky returns, passing over a water glass and watching as Steve drinks the whole thing. “You want a shower? It might make you feel a bit more human.”

By the time Steve gets out of the shower, he does feel better, though he’s still exhausted. Bucky’s spreading a blanket across the couch, fluffing a pillow he’s placed on one arm. “You should take the bed,” Steve says around his toothbrush. “You need the sleep more than me.”

Bucky shakes his head. “I’m not going to bed right away. I don’t want to keep you up.”

“I don’t think that’s even possible,” Steve argues. He thinks if he lay down right now he’d sleep through a stampede. Another wave of sleepiness hits him as if called by his mere thinking about it, slow and thick as syrup, and he struggles through a blink.

Bucky grins at him and walks over, guiding him back toward the bathroom. “Look, we can talk about this tomorrow,” he says. “You’re in no shape to argue right now, and I’ll get fired if you fall asleep standing up and hit your head and die or something. For tonight, you take the bed.”

Yawning so wide his jaw cracks and toothpaste foam drools onto his feet, Steve agrees.

 

Bewildered, unsure of where he is or when, Steve sits up in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. It doesn’t smell right; not quite like home. Sunlight pokes in through a series of very narrow dashed horizontal slits in the shade. For several seconds Steve stares around, uncertain, before movement outside the door and more off-tune singing brings clarity.

Scrubbing a hand through his hair, he gets out of bed. His phone tells him it’s almost ten in the morning. There are no notifications.

Bucky stops singing when Steve opens the bedroom door, turning from the coffeemaker and looking at him for a very long moment. Steve is becoming more comfortable with these stares, though he’s not sure how much he’s giving away each time. “Sleep well?” Bucky finally asks. “You look better.”

“Yes,” Steve says. The blanket that Bucky slept under is folded and draped over the back of the couch, the pillow sitting propped against one of the armrests. “Yeah, yes. I slept well. Did—um, did you?”

There’s a moment where Bucky twists his mouth sideways. “Listen,” he says after a second, “one of my colleagues said they could see me getting ready to sleep on the couch.”

“Oh.” Not sure what this means, Steve takes the coffee that Bucky brings over to him.

“It doesn’t look good for our cover,” Bucky tells him. “We’re—I’m sorry, I know this probably isn’t too comfortable for you, but we’re going to have to share the bed. For your safety.”

For just a second, Steve’s heart speeds up. “Okay. That makes sense,” he says. “I—yeah, no, that’s fine.”

Bucky looks at him again, like he’s checking to see if Steve’s telling the truth; finally, he nods too and walks toward him. “I’m going to touch you,” he says, just before his hands come up to bracket Steve’s hips, and for a moment Steve wonders why he’s telling him before he realizes that Bucky’s trying to prepare him. He leans in—Steve watching, trying to breathe normally and not tense up—and his lips brush the corner of Steve’s mouth. “Put your hands on my shoulders.” Steve does as he’s told, even manages to turn his head toward Bucky so that they’re breathing the same air. He can feel it against his lips when Bucky smiles. “Good. I’m seducing you—can you tell?” Steve huffs half a laugh. “Let’s go into the bedroom. I want to show you something.”

Steve lets himself be walked backwards into the bedroom. He even manages to sling an arm around Bucky’s neck, though it’s mostly because he trips over his own feet and would rather stay upright. Bucky catches him, grinning, his arm strong at Steve’s waist. He kicks the door shut behind them and makes sure Steve’s steady on his feet, then lets go of him.

“Sorry,” he says. “I just—now that we’re here and settled and everything, I need to show you some self-defense. Just in case, you know?” Steve blinks at him, his mind still caught up in the feel of that hard arm at his back. “It’s really unlikely you’ll need it—but it’s always better to be prepared.”

Swallowing, Steve nods. “Yeah—I—yeah. That makes sense.”

Bucky nods and takes two steps to Steve’s right. There’s just enough space for the two of them to move at the end of the bed. “Turn around.” Warily, Steve does as he’s told; Bucky’s hands wrap around his biceps, then slide upward. “Obviously nobody who’s attacking you is going to give you warning like this,” he says. “I’m going to put my hands around your throat. I want you to turn around so you’re facing me again and grab my wrists. Turn fast so I don’t have time to stop you.”

Steve does as he’s told, turning on one heel. Bucky puts up a cursory fight; but when they’re facing each other again, he smiles and takes his hands away from his neck. “Good. Next you’d headbutt me—but please don’t. I like my nose the shape it is now.” Steve kind of does, too. “If you don’t want to break your nose too, you need to make sure you hit them with your forehead.” He taps his thumb on the high part of Steve’s forehead. “Up here. And don’t flop your head all over the place or you’ll give yourself a concussion.”

“Turn. Nose. Forehead. Concussion,” Steve repeats.

“They’ll be stunned once you’ve broken their nose,” Bucky tells him. “You should be able to get away after that.” He hesitates for a second, then turns his back to Steve. “Grab my neck—I’ll show you how it’s supposed to look.”

Knowing it’s not worth protesting, Steve prepares himself, thinking about the coffee he hasn’t gotten to have yet. Then he reaches up and grasps Bucky’s neck, tightening his hands when he’s told to.

Bucky moves so fast Steve mostly misses it; he twists, and grabs Steve’s wrists, hard, his hands dragging at Steve’s arms so hard that his elbows buckle. At the same time, he forcefully brings his whole body forward, head first, and stops himself with his forehead about two inches from Steve’s nose. Steve blinks at his hairline. “See what I mean?” he asks. “You see how hard I was holding your arms?” Steve nods. “Okay. Let’s practice. Turn around.”

 

Bucky keeps him locked in the bedroom for another forty-five minutes, practicing the move again and again until Steve’s well acquainted with the exact shape of Bucky’s nose. “It’s not like you have anywhere else to be right now,” he tells Steve when he asks for a break to pee and get a cup of coffee. “If you go out there right now, you’ll ruin my reputation. I ain’t no quick shot, Steve.”

But finally, he checks his watch and nods. “Okay. Let’s get some breakfast. This is the nicest part of the day, and we’ve got sun on the deck.”

He’s right; it’s warm, but not yet hot, probably in the low seventies. They sit in the same places they had yesterday, and Steve watches as Bucky tips back a little in his chair, hooking his toes under the railing to keep steady and tilting his face up toward the sunshine, eyes shut. His coffee—light brown, almost half milk—sits on the table between them next to the oranges they’ve brought out. Steve sips his own. It’s more like espresso, really, so dark that maybe next time he’ll try it with a bit of milk, just to cut the bitterness.

Eventually he realizes he’s been staring longer than is strictly polite, and he turns to look out over the courtyard. That old woman is at the table downstairs again, drinking coffee and watching as a curly-haired dog patters around in the dust at her feet.

When he chances a look back at Bucky, his eyes are open again, and he’s watching Steve. “How’d we meet?” he asks, his voice at half-volume.

“Oh,” Steve says, again, like it’s the only thing he knows how to say, “I, um. I don’t—what do you like to do? Maybe we have, um, something in common?”

Bucky grins at him, and Steve laughs a little. It’s nice, he thinks, how comfortable Bucky is with him; his ease at Steve’s fumbling is making him more comfortable than he’d expected to be so quickly. “I’m sure we got plenty in common,” he says. “But I don’t really got many hobbies. I don’t really have time for them.”

“What do you do when you have time off?”

Picking up an orange, Bucky digs two fingers into it and starts to peel. “Well, I’m at Stark Tower every couple months for maintenance on this thing.” He waves his hand around, then goes back to holding the orange while the other hand peels. It seems remarkably gentle, barely even dimpling the curve of the orange where he holds it. “But like I said, I’m usually on a job. Or at SHIELD HQ, keeping my combat skills sharp.”

“Do you—do you need those skills much these days?” Steve asks, trying to sound tough. He suspects, from the way Bucky looks at him sidelong, that he fails.

“Not usually.” Bucky shrugs, easy as anything, and pulls the orange apart, holding one half out to Steve.

He takes it, turning it over in his hand. It’s perfectly intact, unbruised. “If you hadn’t joined the army, what would you have done?”

There is a long, long moment of silence. Steve looks up at Bucky; he’s holding his orange half cupped in the palm of his hand, looking at a gauzy white scarf fluttering on the clothesline. In profile, he looks like a Roman statue, his nose straight and stately, his mouth expressive, almost pouty. His hair isn’t quite curly enough for the analogy to work exactly right. “Maybe I’d have been an engineer,” he finally says. “I always liked taking things apart, figuring out how they worked.” He turns to look at Steve. “How could we have met through that?”

Steve thinks for a second. “Well…did we meet through friends?”

Laughing, Bucky tips his chair back again. “I don’t think so,” he says. “We’d have to make someone up for that to work.”

Steve props one foot on his knee and sips his coffee. “Okay. Your turn to think of something.”

Bucky sticks an orange segment in his mouth and looks at the sky while Steve watches him. “We met at the Museum of Natural History. You were looking at the dinosaurs and I was looking at you.”

“And you’re an engineer?”

Yawning, Bucky reaches over and rests his hand on Steve’s thigh, farther up than Steve normally lets strangers touch him. He swallows and reminds himself to breathe; then, tentatively, he reaches out and slips his hand into Bucky’s. For a long second, he stares down at their clasped hands, his brain cranking through everything that has happened to him in the last two months. His breath catches; Bucky’s hand squeezes his, hard.

When he looks around, Bucky’s leaning toward him, still holding his hand, reaching out with his other hand toward him. “Hey,” Bucky says, tugging on Steve’s hand. “You with me?”

Steve looks into his face, thinking of saying yes. But Bucky tilts his head, looking closely at him. “I’m just,” he manages, but he’s not sure how to end the sentence.

“Can I touch you?” Bucky asks, “I mean—touch you more. Like, with this hand.” He wiggles the fingers of his prosthetic hand. Swallowing, Steve nods. Carefully, Bucky reaches out and places his hand on Steve’s arm, rubbing his thumb over the edge of his sleeve. “Can you feel that?”

“Yeah.” His thumb keeps swiping over the numb spot on the inside of his bicep, leftover nerve damage from the bullet.

“Weird, huh?” Bucky murmurs. His voice is soothing, soft; Steve wonders, briefly, how much training he’s had at this part of the job. “It feels just like a regular hand. It feels like skin, doesn’t it?”

Focusing on the fingers stroking just below his sleeve, Steve shuts his eyes for a moment. “Yeah,” he finally whispers.

“It took me ages—months—to get used to it. You know I can feel it like a normal hand?” With his eyes shut, Steve can focus just on Bucky’s voice, the gentle flow of it. “I can feel your skin right now. You got really soft skin, you know that?”

Startled, Steve laughs, opens his eyes to find Bucky smiling at him, just a few inches away. “Hi, yeah, hi,” Bucky says. He rubs his thumb across the back of Steve’s hand—he’d forgotten they were still holding hands—and sits back a little, his prosthetic arm falling to his own lap. Before now Steve hadn’t noticed the grey-brown of his eyes, the way one of his front teeth sits just a little bit in front of its neighbor. “What do you need?”

He considers asking for more touching again, but when he looks into Bucky’s face all he sees is the friendly tilt of his mouth and the way his eyes crinkle up at the corners. They’re not lovers. They’re not even friends. Bucky is not a therapist or a psychiatrist or Steve’s personal teddy bear. He’s a highly trained operative trying to keep Steve safe, and that’s it.

Letting go of Bucky’s hand, Steve pulls a segment off his orange half and sticks it in his mouth. It tastes like paper, though he suspects that has more to do with his mouth than the orange; he chews and swallows and eats another segment and sips his coffee before finally thinking of something to say, still looking at his hands. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” Bucky is still leaning toward him when he looks up, his face inscrutable. Steve tries to meet his eyes, but only manages a second or two before he has to look away, back to fiddling with the orange.

By the time either of them speak again, the sun is creeping toward its peak. It’s starting to get hot and Steve’s tipping the last of his coffee into his mouth, feeling sweat begin to bead along his nose. “I was thinking we could take a walk this morning,” Bucky says. “I can show you around some, and then I was thinking we could have lunch and go to a museum this afternoon. It’s going to be hot, so we’ll want to be indoors after lunch.”

“Okay,” Steve says, wondering if they’re going to hold hands. His palms start sweating a little at the thought. “Yeah, okay, sure.”

 

It’s not fair; when they get home that evening, around seven, Steve’s exhausted again, but Bucky, who was on the same flight as him and really should be just as jetlagged, seems pretty much fine. Steve collapses on the couch and kicks off his shoes; Bucky—who’d held his hand most of the morning and certainly all the way through the Prado—carefully places the gift shop bag down on the floor next to his feet and takes his shoes to put them next to the door.

“Oh,” Steve says, “Thanks. I was—I could have done that.”

Bucky smiles and joins him on the sofa. “It’s a good museum, huh?” he asks. Steve nods, thinking of the Goya exhibit. He’d spent nearly two hours there before Bucky’d finally let go of his hand for the first time and wandered off, at which point he’d decided he should probably be at least a little considerate. “We should have some water,” Bucky says, but doesn’t move.

Dragging himself to his feet, Steve shuffles the few steps to the sink, fills their glasses, and brings them back to the couch. He chugs his and puts the glass on the floor, then sits back and shuts his eyes for a moment.

It’s dusky when he wakes, his head tipped back against the warm grey velvet of the couch cushion. Bucky’s arm against his is solid and warm, his breathing steady. His head rests on Steve’s shoulder. He smells nice, like some kind of spiced wood. Yawning, Steve wiggles a little, trying not to wake him; but it’s too late. He’s already picking his head up off his shoulder, straightening up with a hum.

“Good nap,” Bucky says. “How long was I out?”

Steve checks his watch and then squints at the windows. “Not sure. Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Something like that.”

Bucky turns his back to the windows to face Steve. “I think this is a good time for some snuggling,” he says. “Smile if you’re ready for that.” He tries to give a flirtatious smile and wonders if it looks more like a grimace—but it’s too late, Bucky is already moving in, his mouth just brushing Steve’s jaw and his ear. “Let’s lie down.”

Swallowing down a shiver of both panic and a little bit goosebumpy nerves, Steve lets Bucky press him back until they’re lying down, Bucky half on top of him, one hand behind his head to keep him from hitting it on the side table.

“I’m on your good arm, right?” Bucky asks, right in Steve’s ear. For once he wishes they weren’t so sensitive as he stares up at the ceiling and tries not to gasp. Steve nods. “I don’t know if anyone’s watching. Five more minutes, okay? And then I’ll start on dinner.”

“Okay,” Steve agrees. He tries to rearrange his face into something that looks less stiff. Bucky’s thumb, completely unhelpfully, rubs at his hip. Steve shuts his eyes and discovers that it’s easier this way, actually almost nice. Bucky is warm all up against him, one hand still supporting his head, the other resting gently on the arc of his hip. He doesn’t even cringe when Bucky throws a leg over his, even manages to put the hand that’s not trapped under them high on Bucky’s forearm. It’s his prosthetic, but under Steve’s hand it feels like a real arm, down to the heat of the skin, the prickle of soft hair, the cords of his muscles. Here, in the quiet dim of an apartment half a world from home, Steve’s breath calms. The knot in his belly slips, loosens just a hair.

Eventually, Bucky shifts, breathing deep through his nose and rubbing his hand up Steve’s belly and over his chest. “You smell nice,” he says, nudging his face even closer into Steve’s neck and sniffing. It tickles, and Steve squirms, letting out something awfully close to a giggle. Bucky starts to laugh, his warm breath gushing over Steve’s throat, and he wiggles some more, laughing too, as surprised by the ease at which it comes to his lips as he is by the feeling. Suddenly he tumbles off the couch, Bucky’s hand grabbing his arm though it doesn’t help. He hits the floor with a thud, Bucky already leaning over to look at him over the side of the sofa. Steve pushes up so he’s leaning on his elbows and gives him a false glare.

“Sorry.” Bucky doesn’t sound sorry at all, but he lets go of Steve’s arm and brushes a hand through his hair, leaning over to kiss his forehead. Steve tips his head up into it, and Bucky’s lips find his, just for a second.

Bucky blinks down at him, clears his throat, and rolls to his feet, neatly stepping over Steve’s prone body on the floor. “I should get started on dinner.” Steve watches as he walks away, the line of his shoulders tense under the awkward silence, and after a minute, he gets up to help.

 

Bedtime produces unique challenges. Steve pauses at the bedroom door, looking in; he hadn’t made the bed that morning, so one side of the sheet is crumpled and pulled back while the other side is still mostly pristine. “Um,” he says, turning to look at Bucky, who’s standing just behind him, hand back on his hip. “I—I slept on that side last night. Do you want—or would you rather—?”

“You take whatever side you want,” Bucky tells him, running his hand up Steve’s back.

“Okay,” Steve agrees. His voice comes out kind of squeaky, and he walks into the room to keep from embarrassing himself further. He plugs his phone in to charge—habit, since it’s done nothing at all for the entire day and still has 80% battery—and turns to look around, trying to remember what he usually does next. He watches as Bucky pulls back the other side of the covers and puts his phone on that bedside table, humming as he does, then puts his body between the bed and the window so he can stick a big sheathed combat knife under the pillow and tuck a small handgun under the mattress without being seen. Steve gulps. “I’m—I’m going to. Go brush my teeth.”

Bucky smiles at him. “Cool. I’ll be in in a sec.”

Fleeing, Steve shuts himself into the bathroom and takes several deep breaths before he can reach for his toothbrush without his hand shaking. As he brushes, he stares at his own face in the mirror, not really seeing it.

There comes a tap on the door, and Bucky’s voice. “You decent?”

“Mm,” Steve replies. In theory, yes, he’s decent—clothed and everything, still even in his socks—but how is he supposed to say that everything Bucky does puts another nail in the coffin that is his old life?

Clearly, Bucky takes his non-answer for permission to enter. He slips through the door and shuts it behind him, flicking on the fan and sliding up to sit on the counter. “Are you okay?” he asks. What he calls pajamas are just a pair of grey sweats and a ratty t-shirt that’s so old and so tight that Steve can see the dark circles of his nipples through it.

Steve keeps brushing for a few more seconds, then spits. “Not really,” he says to the faucet.

“Do you want me to keep the knife somewhere else? Or the gun?”

He takes the time to rinse his mouth and spit again, thinking. “No.” He straightens up. “Not if you think it’s safer that way.”

It’s still hard to look Bucky in the eye. Instead he grabs a washcloth and wipes his face. “I can keep you safer the closer they are,” Bucky says. Steve nods. “I drew the shades in the bedroom, so if you want, I can sleep on the floor. I think that would be safe.”

Rubbing at a spot of toothpaste that got onto his shirt, Steve wonders if that would really make anything better. He really doesn’t think it will. “I probably need to get used to you,” he says after a second. Bucky doesn’t speak, just keeps looking at him. “I mean. Right?”

“I think you still don’t look very natural,” he agrees. “Which is—it’s only been a day—it’s to be expected. But if we never start we’ll never learn.”

Steve sucks in a breath and squares his shoulders, looking first at himself in the mirror and then turning to Bucky. “Practice makes perfect,” he says. “Right?”

“Right.” Bucky hops off the counter, grinning, and holds a hand out to Steve. “To bed, then, my love?”

He hesitates for a second before putting his hand in Bucky’s. “To bed.”

The bed is just large enough that they can lie down without touching one another. Still, Steve’s painfully aware of Bucky’s presence, his body less than a foot from Steve’s, his breath slow in the dark. It’s ridiculous and Steve knows it, but he feels like every time he shifts he can feel the lump in the mattress that is Bucky’s gun.

He tries to lie still, intensely conscious that Bucky needs his sleep in order to keep Steve alive. He listens as Bucky’s breath slows and goes even, and as he begins to snore quietly. Rolling onto his side, Steve takes a deep breath and tries to picture how he’d felt earlier, the relative calm that had settled over him as he’d lain on the couch with Bucky. Finally, trying to make himself as small as possible—wishing that Bucky’s arm was at his waist, grounding him, and at the same time wanting to be back at home in his own bed—he dozes off.

 

It’s suffocatingly hot when Steve wakes. His face is stuffed somewhere warm and he jerks back, trying to free himself, gasping for a cool breath and only then realizing that he’d been shoved nose-first under someone’s clothed shoulder. He lies there, panting, for several seconds, waiting for the tingling in his arm to subside before the person behind him shifts and grunts.

He looks over and all at once remembers. It’s Bucky, his hand sliding up the mattress between them and pushing himself up just enough to roll his head to face Steve. He watches him for a moment, barely breathing, wondering if he’d woken him; but after a second, Bucky settles again, smacking his lips.

Up to now, most of the time Steve’s spent watching Bucky has been in half-looks, painfully, consciously aware of how many seconds he’s been staring. He takes the opportunity now to look his fill.

Bucky would truly be an excellent subject to draw—not that Steve hadn’t noticed before—and he has a feeling he’ll be doing a lot of it during this trip. When he’s awake Steve’s noticed he tends to purse his lips a little, like he knows it makes his cheekbones cut a little more; but in sleep Bucky is soft, unaware of Steve’s gaze, his nose a bit bent against the pillow. He starts to snore a little. It’s endearing as hell.

Trying to be quiet, Steve gets up and sneaks out of the room, pulling the door most of the way shut behind him. He sets about making coffee and pulling out food for their breakfast: two peaches, another orange for them to split. What he really wants is a pastry but he thinks Bucky might lose it if he leaves the apartment without him. Maybe he’ll talk him into going for a walk for one later—or maybe they’ll go to a market and Steve can buy the stuff to make his mother’s tea scones.

Or maybe not, he thinks as his mood drops. Maybe that will make him miss her too much. He stands in front of the sink for a long second, letting the bleak feeling in his chest wash over him. Finally he sighs and opens the balcony door, then picks up both coffee mugs in one hand; he digs his teeth into one peach and picks up the other one and the orange, taking everything out and setting it on the table. He settles into one chair and bites a chunk out of the peach.

It’s going to be hot again today. From Steve’s understanding, it’s always hot in Spain in the summer. He likes it, actually; it reminds him a bit of home, though New York is a sticky, oppressive kind of heat. It’s drier here.

Steve’s almost finished his coffee when he hears Bucky moving around inside. “Behind,” he hears Bucky’s voice say, and then, before he has time to puzzle out what exactly that means, a pair of arms slides around his neck. Bucky’s fingers rub over the scar at his shoulder.

“Hi,” Steve manages. His voice is barely even strangled.

Bucky’s weight leans heavily at his back, his mouth ghosting up the side of Steve’s neck. “Morning,” he mumbles against the tender spot under Steve’s ear. It takes all his effort not to jump out of his skin; as it is his heart thumps hard against Bucky’s arm across his chest. “Mm. You want to come learn how to strangle someone with your feet?”

Choking on a bite of peach, Steve wriggles until he’s nose-to-nose with Bucky. “Is that even possible?”

“I’ve never gotten the hang of it,” Bucky says. His eyes flick down to Steve’s mouth and back, and he smirks just a little. “But it’s my best friend’s signature move.” Steve stares at him, swallows hard when his fingers trail across Steve’s chest and come to rest in the ticklish spot at the top of his hip. “C’mon. I want to show you how to protect yourself even if you’re on the ground.”

He takes the peach from Steve and bites into it, hooking two fingers into Steve’s sticky palm and pulling him to his feet and around the chair, back into the apartment. Smiling flirtatiously, he backs toward the bedroom, taking Steve with him. When he backs into the wall next to the bedroom door, he pulls Steve to him, drawing him into a slow kiss, the peach dripping cool juice onto Steve’s neck where Bucky’s holding him.

Just as Steve begins to go dizzy from lack of air and the steady warmth of Bucky’s hand in the dip of his spine, Bucky pulls back, nudges him sideways. Steve lets himself be guided into the bedroom, listens to the door closing softly, and turns.

Bucky smiles at him, walking past him to the bedside table to put down the peach and switch on the lamp. “This is going to be pretty close quarters,” he says, and points at the floor at the end of the bed. “How about you lie down?” Steve goes, if a bit reluctantly. He watches, flat on his back, as Bucky wipes peach juice onto his sweats and kneels beside him. “I’m going to put my knee on your chest, okay? And my hand on your neck. Not hard—not yet—but if it’s too much you can always tap out. Okay?”

Steve swallows and nods, tries to hold still as Bucky’s warm right hand closes on his throat, his left planted flat next to Steve’s head as he places his knee on Steve’s sternum, just enough to feel the pressure. Steve’s pulse thuds against Bucky’s thumb and he resists the urge to squirm out of his hold altogether. Bucky doesn’t move for a long second, looking down at Steve in the half-light, his eyes shadowed so Steve can’t see them.

“I want you to use your left hand to knock my elbow out,” Bucky says, his voice soft. The hair on the back of Steve’s neck stands up as he picks up his hand, trying to figure out exactly what Bucky means. Bucky sits up a little, just enough that he can balance without crushing Steve’s sternum and still hold his throat. With his free left hand, he takes Steve’s and draws it under his right, pressing Steve’s forearm to the inside of his elbow. “You hit me hard enough here and my elbow will buckle. Put your other hand on my side. Roll to your left and throw me off. Then make your escape.”

Taking a deep breath in through his nose—and taking a moment to appreciate that he can still do that, even with Bucky’s hand close under his jaw—Steve clenches his left hand into a fist, the better to keep his wrist solid as he slams it into Bucky’s elbow. As Bucky crumples toward him, he shoves with his other hand, and Bucky goes rolling sideways.

“Good,” Bucky says, sitting up. “We’ll practice on both sides, and I’m going to use more force so you can see what it’s really like.” In one smooth motion, he looms over Steve again, on the opposite side from last time. Steve can hear his left hand whirring as it hovers a few inches over his neck, much of his body weight resting in his knee on Steve’s chest. “Ready?”

“Yes,” Steve says, though he’s not entirely sure that he is. The hand closes on his throat and presses, not hard enough to completely cut off his air supply, but hard enough that color explodes across his vision. His heartbeat ratchets up instantly, jackrabbiting, his heart kicking against his ribs like it wants to get free.

For half a second he panics and reaches up, scrabbles fistfuls of Bucky’s shirt; then he remembers, muscle memory kicking in. He throws his forearm into Bucky’s elbow and tosses him sideways. Bucky nearly crashes into the wall, but Steve barely notices, sitting up and gulping in a sharp breath.

He’s half-aware of Bucky sitting up; the next thing he really knows, they’re sitting across from one another, elbows on bent knees. “I’m glad to know your fight or flight response is tuned for fight,” Bucky says, nudging his foot against Steve’s. He’s grinning when Steve looks up at him. “That makes this all much easier. The last person I worked with, their panic response was to go completely catatonic. I can tell already I won’t get to heroically save you as many times as I did on my last job.”

Steve swallows and smiles at that. His nerves are still jangling. He takes a deep breath, filling his lungs while he can. “Again?” he asks after a moment.

“If you’re ready.”

Wiggling until he’s back on the floor, Steve watches as Bucky crawls toward him. In the dimness, he’s a predator, a big cat stalking toward him. Steve suppresses a shiver as Bucky leans over him, fits a hand over his throat. His lips feel dry; he licks them and takes a last breath in as Bucky squeezes down.

 

When Bucky finally calls it quits, Steve feels flushed, lightheaded. Bucky helps him to sit on the bed and fetches his water glass from the bedside table, then the peach once Steve’s wet his throat. They don’t speak for a long time, Bucky sitting beside him on the edge of the bed, his body heat almost too much at Steve’s side.

It’s only once Steve’s holding a gnarled peach pit and the empty glass that Bucky speaks. “How are you feeling?” he asks. “Still faint?”

“No.” Steve turns to look at him. If he tips his head, Bucky looks concerned. “Better.”

“Come here,” Bucky says, sitting up and cupping Steve’s jaw in his hand. He tips Steve’s chin up until he’s looking at the ceiling, runs two fingers over Steve’s jugular. “That hurt?”

It might, but Steve can’t tell over the goosebumps crawling over his skin. “A little,” he guesses.

Bucky makes a dissatisfied noise. “You bruise easier’n that peach did,” he mutters. “I’ll have to see what you look like in the sun. I can’t see well enough in here.” He lets go of Steve’s head; for a second, Steve keeps blinking at the ceiling, composing himself before letting his chin drop again. “You want to go have a shower? I’ll stay in here, pretend you wore me out, and shower once you’re done.”

“Didn’t I?” Steve asks, before he can stop himself.

Bucky smirks at him. “Nearly, sugar pie,” he says, and jerks his head toward the door. “Go on. I’ll be out soon.”

 

Bucky joins him on the balcony after his shower, his bare feet slapping a little on the dry tile of its floor. He kisses the top of Steve’s head and down the side of his face until he can get close enough to his neck to inspect the bruising. It hadn’t looked like much in the mirror, but Steve lets him look anyway, tips his head a little to give him better access. “How’s it look?”

For a second, Bucky doesn’t speak. “Not as bad as I thought. You’re not bruised—just, I don’t know, just red. Like you got pinched,” he says. “I have some concealer that might work. Or I could give you a big ol’ hickey and these marks would blend right in.”

It would, Steve thinks, be the right thing to laugh; but he only manages a weak chuckle. Bucky gives him a single nipping kiss near his collar and gracefully drapes himself into the other seat. “Thanks,” he says, picking up the cup of coffee Steve’d brought out for him. His hair is still soaked, water dripping down the column of his neck and dampening his collar.

“Sure,” Steve replies, trying to act natural.

“What should we do today?” Bucky picks up one of the oranges and begins to peel it, popping three segments into his mouth at once.

“It’s Sunday,” Steve tells him.

“That’s right.” Bucky looks at him; he looks back at Bucky. “Um, I probably should know what that means, but…”

Sometimes Steve forgets that other people aren’t like him. “Church,” he says. “I usually go to church.”

“Oh,” Bucky says. “Yeah, we can do that. What time is it?” He turns and squints into the apartment, craning his neck to see the oven clock. “8:30. Let me throw some clothes on and see if I can find someone who’ll direct us to one.” Picking up his coffee, he gets up and steps over the threshold back indoors, then turns back. “Catholic, right?” Steve nods. “Good, that makes things easy. And I’ll get out the concealer. I’d rather not get smote just for getting a little freaky with my husband.”

 

They sneak in a couple of minutes late to the ten o’clock Mass, taking seats in the backmost pew. It shouldn’t surprise Steve—and yet it does, just a little—that the entire thing is in Spanish, but he gets by standing when everyone else stands, kneeling, sitting. It seems like he and Bucky are the youngest and tallest people in the room; most of the people around them are old and hunched, gnarled hands gripping canes.

When the congregation starts moving toward the front for Communion, Steve with them, Bucky plucks at his sleeve. “We stand out enough just being here. I don’t think we should go let everyone know we’re foreign, too,” he mutters into Steve’s ear, “I hadn’t realized everyone here would be quite so…tiny.”

The joke makes him smile. He’d been thinking of arguing, but Bucky is right. Steve settles back into his seat, propping one foot on the kneeling stool folded out of the pew in front, and takes a chance to look around the building. It’s domed and painted in bright blues and reds, gold accents shining even in the dimness of the place. There are windows, but only a few, narrow and placed high, filled with stained glass. It is both like and unlike the church he’d gone to back home; this one is bigger by a lot, and richer, but it smells more like home than Steve had been prepared for. He doesn’t understand and can’t sing along to the hymns, but they ring through the place under his heart in the same way that they do back home. The imagery is everything he’s known since childhood. This is the safest, the most sure he’s felt since the shooting.

At the end of Mass, they let most people file out before getting up, and then Steve makes Bucky stop so he can donate a few euros and light a couple of candles. As the wick catches the flame and flares, he thinks of his mother again. He’s only done this alone a handful of times; usually she’s there with him, holding his arm as he lights a candle for his father. Back home, they light one every Sunday.

A block from the church, Steve finally manages to work up his nerve; tentatively, he reaches out and places his hand around the inside of Bucky’s elbow. Bucky slows and turns to look at him, smiling, and sticks his elbow out a little farther so Steve can pull closer.

“Um,” Steve says as they walk. Bucky hums a question and pushes his sunglasses up his nose. “Can we stop at a grocery store? I was thinking about—my mom makes these tea scones, and I…”

“I love scones,” Bucky supplies when Steve falls silent, like he knows that Steve’s struggling. “There’s a market a couple of blocks from the apartment. And I was thinking we could eat in again tonight.”

They meander their way to the small grocery and then home; it’s still cool—well, coolish—and the neighborhood they’re walking through is quiet and peaceful. Before the church and in it, Steve had thought that Bucky’s dress shirt was white; but this close to it, touching it, it’s actually dove grey, crisp and soft at the same time. Steve’s sweating his navy blue.

When they get back to the apartment, Bucky throws open all the windows and the balcony door while Steve changes. He’s unpacking the groceries when Steve steps out of the bathroom. “I’ve got to send a few emails,” he says while Steve digs around for a mixing bowl. “I’m looking forward to those scones, though.”

Steve’s been kneading the scone batter for about six minutes, trying to figure out some way to start a conversation, when Bucky takes charge: “Can I ask you something?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Steve glances over his shoulder to where Bucky’s sitting at the table in front of his computer and waits.

Bucky taps out another few keys, then closes his laptop and gets up to put it on the side table. He draws the blinds so the kitchen is cast into shade. “You’re a tattoo artist, right? So why don’t you have any tattoos?”

“Oh.” Taking a moment to add a bit more buttermilk to the batter, Steve looks at his bare arms. “I mean, I do—just, not very many.”

“Why not more, then?”

Steve looks over his shoulder at him again. He’s been asked many questions about tattoos, his own and otherwise; but usually they’re more along the lines of _why_ than _why not_. “I…I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I’m just picky?”

Bucky nods. “Are there any in spots that you’d show me, or are we talking about, like, one of those dragon tattoos on your junk?”

“It’s a large unicorn, actually,” Steve says—and realizes, apparently at the same time Bucky does, that this is the first time he’s joked since they arrived. “No, yeah, here.” He turns from the counter and hooks a cleanish finger under the hem of his shirt, pulling it up until the little orange sun six inches under his armpit is visible.

Bucky makes a motion like he’s going to reach out and touch it, but seems to think better of it, instead just leaning closer and squinting at it. Swallowing, Steve wonders how it might have felt if he’d touched him; he pictures, just for a moment, a tableau of how they might look: Bucky leaning toward him, his hand gentle on Steve’s skin. He gulps down a shiver. “Does it mean something?”

“My ma calls me Sunshine Boy,” Steve explains. There was a time when that embarrassed the hell out of him, but he’d come to terms with it long before he’d gotten the tattoo.

After a moment, Bucky sits back, and Steve lets his shirt fall back into place. “So that’s it?” Bucky asks. “You won’t even show me a little bit of your unicorn?” Laughing, Steve pushes the waistband of his shorts down just a little. The smile drops off Bucky’s face as he watches, his eyes widening, only to return just a moment later. “Jesus Christ, I thought you were actually serious for a minute,” he says, and leans forward again to look at the little flower arcing over the curve of Steve’s hipbone. “Is—is that a peony?”

“Dahlia. My father used to buy them for my ma,” Steve explains. “Sometimes, if I’m thinking about something else, I think it’s a rash, the pink of it.” Laughing, Bucky picks at a gash in the edge of the table. “What about you? Do you have any?”

“I did.” He waves the hand of his prosthetic arm around, wiggling the fingers. “It’s gone now.” Steve must make some kind of uncomfortable face, because he shrugs. “I could get this arm painted, if I wanted. Stark said. I just…I guess I always kind of expected that he might want it back eventually. The arm.”

“What did you have before?”

For a second, Bucky digs at the cut in the table with his thumbnail. “It was a duck.”

Of all the things Steve had been expecting—his unit number, an anchor, a large and poorly crafted tiger—that had not really been on his list. He chokes, indiscreetly, on his own spit, and Bucky gives him a smile.

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “When I was seventeen, I took my little sister up to Boston for a weekend.” He swallows, then swallows again, like he’s having a hard time forming words, so Steve helps.

“The Commons. _Make Way for Ducklings_.”

Bucky looks up at him and nods, his eyes bright. “That’s right.” He half-smiles. “I have this picture of her sitting on one. So when I—before I shipped out the first time, I just got. You know. Just the one little duck.”

The smile on Bucky’s face is so tender, Steve almost feels like he’s intruding. “And you wouldn’t get it again? Not even somewhere else?”

Bucky shakes his head. “It goes on my left. Becca’s always been my left-hand man. Because we’re both lefties,” he says. “I’d get it painted. I guess. Maybe. I don’t know—I couldn’t lose it again.” Taking in a deep breath, he lets it out slow, combing a hand through his hair and craning his neck a little to peer out the balcony. Then he laughs and shakes his head again. “You must be glad you asked, huh?”

Steve, actually, is brimming with more questions, trying not to ask them because Bucky looks wrung out just by the ones he’s already asked. “It’s my favorite part,” he tells him, “of what I do. You know, people come in with these totally obscure ideas, and then while I’m working they’ll tell me why. It’s the best part, being trusted with those stories.”

“Yeah, well,” Bucky snorts, “I’m the one who’s supposed to be here for you, remember? I’m not supposed to be laying my shit on you.”

Looking at Bucky, the way he’s not quite looking back, Steve wonders if he has very many people that he could lay any of his shit on. “I don’t mind,” he says again. “Really. I don’t.” When Bucky keeps resolutely staring at his own hands, Steve finally turns back to the batter, which is just about ready to be flattened and cut into triangles. He puts his hands to work. “She must be really special. Your sister.”

For a few long seconds, Bucky doesn’t answer. “Yeah,” he says finally, quiet. “Yeah, she is.”

 

“Come on. Get up. We have a train to catch.”

Steve grunts and shoves his face further into his pillow. How did Sam even get into his apartment?

“Steve, please. I spent twenty whole euros on our train tickets. I want to show you Toledo. Please, you’ll love it, I promise.”

Steve picks his head up. Those are words he doesn’t think Sam should be saying. When he squints around, Bucky grins at him. “Ugh,” he says, putting his head back down.

The hand on his shoulder rubs briskly. “I know, this isn’t the face anyone ever wants to see first thing in the morning,” Bucky says. “But for real—I think you’ll really like Toledo and our train leaves in an hour, so you should probably get up.”

It’s not until they’re getting off the train in Toledo that Steve finally feels any kind of awake. He’s on his third cup of coffee—the first in the apartment while getting dressed, the second bought just before boarding, a terrible third rom the train’s tiny café car—and finally the resentment for waking up in Spain is ebbing.

Still, he’s not paying too much attention as they disembark, tipping his sunglasses off the top of his head and onto his nose. He lets Bucky tug him along by the hand while he sucks down the last of his coffee, so it takes a couple of moments before he takes in his surroundings.

“What—”

Bringing his coffee cup down from his face, Steve stares around. In the ten seconds he hadn’t been paying attention, they’ve stepped into a different world: cobblestones under their feet, old stuccoed houses bracketing streets so narrow most cars couldn’t pass through. At the top of the hill is a huge castle.

“I know,” Bucky says, turning to smile at him. “And this is just the beginning. Come on.”

Steve doesn’t know what he’d expected, but it’s certainly not this: Bucky draws him into a small building that’s pretty enough outside, its light brick façade laid in a lovely arch pattern. Bucky throws a look over his shoulder as he leads Steve inside, like he knows something Steve doesn’t.

It’s a mosque, which Steve thinks he might have suspected from the shape of the arches outside but hadn’t. If it looked small from the outside, it’s tiny on the inside, its floor tiles laid in a herringbone pattern, horseshoe arches holding the roof up. There are five or six other tourists in the place, but even that small number makes the place seem crowded.

Bucky nudges him into the middle of the square room and gestures for him to look up. The cupola is lit up, the white bricks around the edge making the blue ones—blue like the sky in the evening, blue like the inside of an iris—stand out in sharp relief. The bricks are organized so that they form an eight-point star.

“Those bricks were laid a thousand years ago,” Bucky tells him, his voice soft. Steve tears his eyes away from the dome to look at him, shocked, but he’s still looking upward. “This place is almost entirely the same as when it was built.”

Steve goes back to looking at the domed roof, too. So Bucky had been right, that he’d like it here. His fingers itch for a pencil. There’s something about the symmetricity, the loving way each brick has been placed so specifically to create the pattern. Most of the tattoos that Steve makes are freeform, asymmetrical things. But there’s something about these patterns, which seem to recur around the whole building, that seems to settle his bones. There is an order to each tile, a precision to the whole fresco.

His neck is aching when Bucky finally tugs on his sleeve. He hadn’t realized he’d been looking for so long. Bucky’s smile is self-satisfied. “I was right, huh?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Steve replies. A smile fidgets under his skin, but he manages to press it down.

Laughing, Bucky shoves at his shoulder. “Don’t you play with me, Grant Stephens,” he says, pushing him out into the sunshine again. “I know you liked it in there. You stood completely motionless for forty-five minutes.”

Had it really been that long? Steve checks his watch. “I did not,” he protests. “It can’t have been more than fifteen.”

Bucky eyeballs him, a smirk fighting its way onto his mouth. “I’ll go as low as twenty.”

Steve plants his hand on his hips; Bucky beams at him. “Why didn’t you say something earlier? We could have kept going.”

Reaching for his hand, Bucky tugs him along, up the hill toward the castle. He gives him a half-smile, but Steve doesn’t quite see it in his eyes, which are looking thoughtful at him again. “I didn’t mind,” Bucky tells him, and then whatever tension is between them breaks as he reminds Steve why they’re there: “I married an artist, didn’t I?”

By the time they get back to Madrid, it’s nearly ten, the evening just starting to cool off as the sun sets. They stop for dinner on the way home, then make the walk back mostly in silence, still holding hands. It almost feels natural.

As they turn a corner, Bucky draws close, kissing at Steve’s ear. “I’m going to kiss you,” he whispers, then pulls Steve to a stop, wrapping both arms around his waist. “Laugh at something I said.”

Steve tries on a fake laugh, made real by Bucky’s nose tickling his neck, and Bucky starts laughing too, and then they’re kissing, wrapped up in one another here on a dim empty street. It seems—not easy, exactly, but it does feel natural. Bucky’s arm is at his waist, his other hand cupping the back of his head, directing him. Somehow, though Steve’s sure they haven’t been near a fire all day, he smells like woodsmoke.

Half-delirious, Steve wonders if actors kiss one another for real, or if they’ve figured out some way to just make it look real; if they have, Bucky’s not doing it. Bucky’s all in. He tips his head, taking half a step forward so that his foot is between Steve’s two; tongues at the corner of Steve’s mouth.

Surprised by it, Steve gasps, clutching at Bucky’s sleeve. How long has it been since he’s been kissed like this? He’s dizzy with it, struggling to remind himself that this is just for show, that they’re probably being watched right now. His body isn’t listening to his brain, is instead kissing back, trying to crawl into Bucky through his mouth.

Gently, Bucky pulls back. He’s breathing as hard as Steve is. For a long second, neither of them moves; Steve doesn’t even open his eyes. Some absurd part of him doesn’t want to see if Bucky’s looking at him or around for a threat. As Bucky strokes his hand down Steve’s neck and lets his arm loosen from his waist, Steve finally opens his eyes.

Bucky smiles at him and leans in for one more brief kiss. “Home?” he asks.

Steve swallows, and nods, and lets Bucky’s warm hand take his and pull him along toward the apartment once more. He wonders, irrationally, knowing he shouldn’t be thinking it, if he could convince Bucky that he’s seen someone, that they have to kiss again to keep their cover. Then Bucky looks over at him and smiles, and Steve blushes, hoping that in the dusk it’s not noticeable. He lets out a low breath and watches his feet the rest of the way home.

“Thanks,” Steve says as he waits for Bucky to unlock their door. “For—today. You were right. I loved it.”

Swinging open the door, Bucky smiles at him, and takes his hand again to pull him inside. “I knew you would,” he says, just as he advances enough to shut the door and lock it. He tips forward to kiss Steve again, then, an inch from his face, continues: “I was thinking of having a shower. Think you can handle sitting in the bathroom with me while I do that?”

“I was—” Steve clears his throat, desperate to get his feet back under him—“I was thinking of doing the same thing, actually.”

Bucky flat out beams at him, crowding in for another smacking kiss before taking Steve’s hand and dragging him into the bathroom. As soon as the door is closed, he drops the act and gestures to the shower. “You can go first. Here, I’ll face the wall while you get in.”

Wrong-footed again, Steve stares at his back long enough that Bucky peeks. “What? I—sorry, never mind,” Steve says, “I’ll, yeah, I’ll shower. Thanks.”

 

Steve sips his coffee, picking at the cardboard sleeve protecting his hand from the heat. He doesn’t like iced coffee and never has; so he’s glad they’d decided to go for a short jog with a Starbucks stop on their way back to the apartment before the temperature in the city had gotten unbearable.

It’s weird, drinking this coffee here. He could so easily be back home in New York, taking advantage of the early summer sunrise to walk to work, stopping on the way for a blonde roast because the hipster place next door, the one with better coffee, has a line around the corner and he didn’t put on sunscreen.

Bucky’s hand slips into his and Steve swallows a big hot gulp of coffee. He can feel it steaming as it settles in his belly. Swallowing again, trying to subtly breathe through his mouth and cool off his throat, Steve glances over at him. Bucky’d kept him in the bedroom a little extra late this morning, teaching him how to disarm an opponent with a knife until they’d both been sweaty and flushed, then had suggested a run for some fresh air. He’d spent the first twenty minutes of their run flirting outrageously with Steve, making eyes at him as if he absolutely couldn’t get enough of him, as if the hour and a half they’d just spent pretending to have sex hadn’t been nearly enough.

In the dappled sunlight of the park, sunglasses perched in his curling hair, Bucky sucks on the straw of his iced coffee. “What?” he asks, smiling when Steve ducks his head. “What? Is there something on my face?”

“No, nothing,” Steve tells him.

“Then what?” Bucky asks again. His lips are cold when he kisses at Steve’s jaw, letting go of Steve’s hand so he can pull him close with an arm around his waist. “I know what it is. You were just too shy to say you wanted to kiss me, right?”

Something inside Steve squirms, and he lets himself be drawn into one gentle indulgent kiss, just long enough that his belly twists, just long enough to think of an excuse to pull back. Then he wrinkles his nose. “You taste like fake vanilla,” he says. “Why do you _always_ have to get vanilla?”

Bucky snickers at him and kisses at his knuckles. “I _like_ vanilla. And I always brush my teeth before I kiss you.”

Steve narrows his eyes at him. “You _usually_ brush your teeth,” he argues, just because it’s nice out and he doesn’t want to ruin the day by ending the banter here. “And you’re going to have to brush before I let you anywhere near me now.” Bucky pouts at him, so he rolls his eyes and tugs him onward. “Come on. We should get in before it gets really hot.”

 

After lunch—which they eat standing at a high-top in a tapas bar—they wile away the afternoon in the apartment, all the windows and the balcony door thrown wide so that a warm breeze tickles at the backs of their necks. Bucky reads, mostly, and steps out three times, returning within the half hour. Each time he does, he’s purchased a little treat: a bouquet of daffodils, a pair of ice cream sandwiches, a bottle of wine for them to open over dinner.

Steve draws, mostly. He sketches his mother’s face from memory, from the last time he’d seen her, craning up so he could kiss her cheek goodbye. She’d been wearing a white floppy sunhat to keep her nose from freckling too badly—which was good, because Mother’s Day had been blazingly sunny and they’d eaten brunch on the rooftop patio of a Mexican restaurant and the tops of Steve’s ears had stung for days after.

By the time her face has formed on his page, he has to get up and take a lap around the apartment. He stops to wash his face in the bathroom and has a glass of juice before sitting back down. Bucky barely looks up.

Steve turns to a fresh page and looks up, wondering what to draw next. The only interesting thing in the whole room is Bucky, chewing on the rolled-up end of his ice cream sandwich wrapper, one hand holding his tablet up to read. Steve’s pencil starts to move, and the next time he looks up all the basics are there: his sharp nose, the curve of his eyebrow, the way a strand of hair falls over his forehead.

It’s close to nine by the time Bucky finally looks up and stretches. The breeze has finally turned cool as the sun dips past the edge of the next building. “Mm,” Bucky says. “You hungry?”

“If you are,” Steve says, his pencil completing the last stroke of Bucky’s ear.

“That’s not an answer,” Bucky says, already on his feet and pulling the egg carton out of the fridge. “How about you open that wine?”

Steve closes his sketchbook and leaves it on the side table. He gets up to find a corkscrew while Bucky heats up a pan with some olive oil and cracks a few eggs into the potatoes he’d fried earlier. He sets a glass near Bucky’s elbow and turns on the spot, wondering what he should do next. “What did you draw this afternoon?” Bucky asks.

“Uh. My mom.” A blush crawls up his cheeks. “You.”

“Me, huh? You’re not sick of my face yet?”

Actually, Steve’s begun to suspect that what was at first artistic sensitivity is turning into something more like a crush. “You were a good model, just sitting there motionless for hours on end.”

“I try.” Bucky nods and pours the scrambled egg and potato mixture into the pan, which sizzles as he continues to whip it with a fork. “Can I see?”

“I…if you want,” Steve says. There’s a small part of him screaming that he shouldn’t show it, but Bucky’s looking over his shoulder at him expectantly. “It’s, you know, just a sketch. It’s pretty rough.”

“You calling me ugly?”

“What? No! I—” What the hell is he supposed to say to that? “The _sketch_ is rough. You’re—um, you’re. Smooth.” Jesus Christ. That’s not better.

Bucky laughs out loud, throwing his head back as he shakes the pan. The egg-and-potato mixture slides around it. Steve cringes while Bucky’s not looking. He’s pretty sure he wasn’t always such a dork. Is it something about Bucky that makes him this way, or has he changed, in the weeks since the shooting?

Grabbing his sketchbook off the side table, he watches Bucky cut the omelet in half and plate the two pieces, bringing them to the table and going back for his wine and a pair of forks. “Here,” Steve says, nudging the sketchbook in his direction and starting to eat, not wanting to look as Bucky inspects his work.

He’s almost halfway through dinner—which is, again, delicious—by the time Bucky speaks. “Steve. These are amazing.” Bucky is looking at the drawing of Steve’s mother on one page, several small body studies on the opposite. He traces a finger over the curve of a dancer’s leg. “I didn’t—I looked at some of your tattoos online. I creeped your Instagram. I thought I knew what your art looked like. But these—these are incredible. They’re so _different_. Why don’t you ever post anything like this?”

Well—Bucky knows everything else about him, pretty much. “I have a private one,” Steve tells him. “People who follow my tattoo Instagram—they want to see the tattoos. I don’t think they want to see stuff like this.”

“Will you show me?” Bucky asks, and shovels a huge chunk of eggy potatoey goodness into his mouth. “And I think you’re wrong, by the way.”

Steve’s phone is in the bedroom, where he’d left it that morning instead of bringing it out with him. When he pulls it off the charger, it lights up, showing him—not a blank screen, like he’d been steeling himself for—a missed call.

“Bucky,” he calls, staring down at it. _1 New Voicemail from Sam Wilson_.

It’s barely a second before Bucky’s in the room with him, fork still in one hand, combat knife unsheathed in the other. Steve doesn’t move while Bucky looks around, realizes there’s no impending threat, and comes to peek over his shoulder.

“Oh,” Bucky says. It feels like Steve can’t breathe, like he’s losing the plot as he reads and rereads the notification. His best friend, Sam Wilson. One new voicemail from this morning, probably while he and Bucky were holding hands and flirting in the park.

“What do I do?”

Bucky doesn’t answer for a long moment, and Steve starts to panic. He had just been thinking that he’d been getting used to it—‘it’ being Spain, ‘it’ being leaving his life behind, not ‘it’ being in close proximity to his new favorite model all the time—but he’s afraid now, afraid and sad and angry that this is happening to him at all.

“I don’t think you should listen to the message,” Bucky finally says. His hand slides into Steve’s. “Come on, leave it, let’s go have another glass of wine.”

He looks up at Bucky, who tugs on his hand. Numbly, he taps the play button. Bucky purses his lips but doesn’t speak.

“ _Steve_ ,” says Sam’s voice. He’s drunk, Steve can tell already, completely wasted. “ _Steve, you fuckin’—I went to see your mom today._ ” Steve’s mouth is open, though he doesn’t have anything to say. Bucky’s hand in his squeezes, so tight it hurts a little. He squeezes back. “ _She’s not doing good, you know?_ ” There’s a prolonged moment of silence, punctuated by a shuffling sound. Slowly, Bucky pulls Steve out of the bedroom and over to the couch. “ _You left her. You…you fuckin’ left her. And. And me, too, you know?_ ” Steve buckles, pressing his forehead to his knees, and has to restrain himself from covering his ears.

“ _Jesus. And now here I am, standin’ in front of your grave, and she’s—she leaves you flowers, Steve. There are goddamn daffodils here. Did you know that? Your mother puts daffodils on your grave every week because she—_ ” Sam hiccups. Letting go of Steve’s hand, Bucky rubs his palm up his back. “ _I’m standing here swearing in a fucking church cemetery at three in the goddamn morning, Steve, because you decided to go to a fucking—why were you even in DUMBO in the first place?_ ” Sam growls, and there’s more shuffling and a slow sigh, like Sam’s leaning on the gravestone that marks the place where Steve’s body is not. Bucky’s hand grips the back of Steve’s neck, grounding him as he shudders and clutches at his skull. There’s more shuffling, like Sam has collapsed and is now lying on the ground, and then his voice, quiet: “ _I’ll take care of her for you, Steve, you fucking asshole. Don’t worry about her. I’ll take care of her, I promise._ ” The line clicks off.

Gasping, Steve presses his forehead harder against his kneecaps, presses until it hurts. “Steve,” Bucky murmurs, his voice close to Steve’s ear. Steve lets out a breath as Bucky’s arm drapes around him, his free hand rubbing through Steve’s hair. “Steve, just breathe, okay? Shh, it’s alright. They’ll be alright. Sam’s keeping an eye on your mom, hm? She’ll be okay.” He holds him tightly, saying soft words into his ear until Steve calms enough that his breathing eases. “There, that’s it. Your mom’s going to be just fine, isn’t she? You trust Sam, I know you do.” Gently, Bucky guides Steve’s head onto his shoulder, rubs a hand up his back.

“She’s alone,” Steve mumbles. “She’s alone, and it’s my fault.”

“It’s not.” Bucky smooths his hand over Steve’s hair. “It’s not your fault, Steve.”

Steve squirms out of his hold, stumbles to his feet. “I need to go home. I have to go back to her.” His stomach is jumping; suddenly he trembles with the need to do something. “Take me home.”

Bucky looks up at him for a moment. “We can’t go back, Steve. You know that.”

“I have to.”

Bucky gets up, slow like he’s trying not to spook him. “If you go back there, you’ll be in danger,” he says.

Glaring at him, Steve turns and paces to the window and back. “ _I don’t care_ ,” he insists. “I don’t. Did you hear Sam? My mother brings daffodils to my grave. _My grave_. The one _I’m not in_.”

“And would it be better if you were in it?”

“Aren’t you supposed to keep me safe?” Steve asks. “Isn’t that your job?”

Bucky, looking sour, sticks his hands into his pockets. “Yes,” he says. “It is. And my professional opinion is that if we go back to New York right now, you’ll probably die, and so will your mother. And Sam. And everyone else you know.”

The breath leaves Steve in a rush. He considers accusing Bucky of lying, of exaggerating; but when he looks at him he knows he’s not. Twisting the hem of his shirt around his hand, he swallows against the blind panic closing up his throat once more. For a moment, Bucky says nothing; then he walks toward Steve and puts a hand around the back of his neck. “C’mere,” he says, and Steve goes, swaying in to press his forehead to Bucky’s warm shoulder. “I know, Steve. I know. Once the trial’s on, we’ll go back, okay? We’ll go back, and you’ll testify, and all of those people will go to prison, and you’ll get to see your mom, and Sam, and it’ll all be over.”

 

Steve wakes late in the morning. He’d fallen asleep on the couch the night before, exhausted, Bucky holding onto him tight; and at some point very late or perhaps very early Bucky’d nudged him to his feet and led him, arm around his waist, to the bedroom. His mouth feels like glue. His whole body does, actually, sluggish and sticky.

He’s curled up tight against Bucky, on his side facing the open window. Bucky’s thumb rubs circles behind his ear. Steve listens as Bucky takes a cup of some sort off the side table and slurps at its contents. The scent of coffee hits him; he breathes deep and opens his eyes.

“Hey there,” Bucky says immediately, softly, putting aside his tablet and petting at Steve’s hair. “How are you feeling?”

Steve tips his head back into the cradle of Bucky’s hand and shuts his eyes again. “Thirsty,” he croaks. “What time is it?”

From seemingly nowhere, Bucky produces a glass of water; Steve half-sits to drink it, then lies back down exactly as he was before. “Almost noon,” Bucky tells him once he’s settled again. “I figured I’d let you rest, since we hadn’t made plans for today.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, humming gratefully when Bucky kneads a little at his scalp. It’s quiet for several long seconds before Steve begins to vibrate with it. “Are you reading again?”

“I was, yeah.”

“What are you reading?”

“Nothing interesting,” Bucky says; when Steve looks up at him, he gives a huge, falsely bright smile.

Steve narrows his eyes. “Are you embarrassed, or is it something you can’t tell me?”

For a second, Bucky just blinks down at him. “It’s just embarrassing,” he finally says.

“What is it?” Steve asks, grinning, craning his head around so he’s looking at Bucky right side up.

“I don’t want to tell you,” Bucky says, but he’s beginning to smile. “You’re just going to laugh at me.”

“I mean, probably, yeah.”

Laughing, Bucky tickles the back of Steve’s neck. He yelps and squirms, finally managing to stop the tickling by lying his entire body across Bucky’s arm, pinning it to the bed. “Okay, I’ll tell you,” Bucky says. “But you can’t tell anyone else.”

“Who am I going to tell?” Steve asks, then bites his lip. He’d expected pain from that, as sharp as it had been last night. But it doesn’t sting so bad, saying it here, in a puddle of sunny bedsheets, laughing. “It’s just you and me here.”

Bucky lounges back against the pillows, his arm still stuck under Steve. His smirk goes a little sly, and his fingers wiggle against Steve’s side. Steve pins it with his elbow and glares at him. “I’m rereading _Harry Potter_ ,” Bucky tells him, still half-smiling.

“Why would anyone laugh at that?”

Shrugging with the shoulder that’s not currently caught under Steve’s chest, Bucky goes a little pink. It’s a good color on him. “I don’t know. Some people are assholes?”

“Well, not me,” Steve says. He feels like he’s staring into the sun, looking at Bucky’s face. Is Bucky aware of how beautiful he is? While Steve sweats in his presence, Bucky is oblivious, busy doing his work, keeping him alive. He pushes himself up. “Okay. Coffee.”

The daffodils that Bucky’d bought the day before are gone. For a moment Steve stares at the empty spot on the table where they’d been, thinking about Sam curled up by his gravestone, looking at the daffodils his mother had left, thinking about his mother plucking at weeds, arranging yellow against his name, same as he’s watched her do a thousand times for his father. Finally, taking a deep breath and letting it out slow, he pours himself some coffee and heads back toward the bedroom.

“Would you judge me a lot if I got back in bed after I shower?” Steve asks, leaning against the bedroom door and sipping his coffee.

Bucky looks up from his tablet. “I’ve been awake for four hours and I’m still in my sweats. I don’t think I’m even qualified to judge you.”

He’s still there when Steve gets out of the shower, still reading. Steve refills both of their coffee cups and grabs some rations and his sketchbook, then climbs back into bed. “You going to draw me again?” Bucky asks, tilting his head and putting on what he clearly thinks is a sexy face. “How’s this?”

Steve laughs and shoves his shoulder into Bucky’s. “You look like a duck,” he says. “You could get your own face tattooed on your arm.”

“Painted,” Bucky corrects him, shoving him back. “If you draw it, I’ll do it. I swear I will.”

Rolling his eyes, Steve settles in. “I’m not enabling you,” he says. “You want your own duckface, you’re going to have to get it from someone else.” Bucky grins down at him for a second; Steve chews on his lip. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” Bucky says.

“Has your arm always looked like that? It’s not really—I mean, Tony likes, you know. It’s just. Not really his aesthetic. He likes metal things to look like metal.” That’s not the entire truth. Tony likes everything to look like metal. Steve has given him multiple tattoos that make his skin look like armor.

Bucky holds up his hand and wiggles his fingers. The motors in them whir. “It actually looks pretty cool. It’s just bad for my cover,” he says. “Stark installed a cloaking device for me.”

“Was he happy about that?”

“What do you think?” Bucky snorts. “But he did it when I asked.”

Steve thinks for a second, looking at the fingers. “If you painted it, would it paint the cloak?” he asks. “Or only the metal underneath?”

When Bucky doesn’t answer right away, Steve cranes his neck to look at him. He’s frowning at his hand; when he notices Steve looking, he nudges him with his elbow. “We’ll have to try it sometime.”

Bucky starts reading aloud to Steve when he asks, sometime shortly after he finishes his coffee. He sinks into the flow of his voice, the heat of his body against Steve’s side, the tactile scratch of his pencil on paper, the comfort of a story he knows by heart. By the time lunchtime rolls around, he’s shuffled down the mattress, his head resting against the spot below Bucky’s ribcage and above his hip. Bucky’s hand is in his hair. He’s got pages full of many things: a stag, a storm, a sphinx, a study of Bucky’s hand holding the tablet. But he’d been thinking a lot about _Make Way for Ducklings_ , so there are plenty of ducks, too.

He closes his sketchbook as Bucky finishes the chapter, not wanting to talk about what he’s drawn. Maybe Bucky’d said he’d take the duckface, but it’s a different story to show him what he’d once had. “What were you drawing?” Bucky asks, draining his coffee. “Me again? Should I buy you some paints that will work on my arm? I’m really digging this duckface idea.”

Steve snorts and rolls over to shove the sketchbook between the mattress and the bedside table. “Alright, Mr. Model Man. Take me for lunch. And then I want to go back to the Prado.”

 

Glass shatters.

Steve looks up from his drink in time to catch Bucky’s panicked face as he vaults over the table, knocking Steve to the floor. Pain shatters across his chest from his shoulder.

Gunfire—the acrid sharp scent of hot metal.

He clutches at Bucky, looks up into his face. Blood dribbles from Bucky’s mouth. He looks at Steve—gives a quiet cough—

“Jesus _Christ_ , Steve, _wake up!_ ”

With a gasp so hard that it hurts his chest, Steve jerks up and sideways, scrabbling out from under the hands shaking him. He tumbles out of bed, bashes his elbow on something, and kicks the mattress trying to get away. There’s a tearing sound as he pulls at the sheet.

A light flips on. Steve, panting, looks up. Bucky—alive—kneels on the bed, hair in total disarray. “Steve,” he says. Steve stares and coughs and stares, and Bucky shuffles to the edge of the mattress and stands. “Steve. Say something.”

Steve blinks at him. “You’re alive.”

“I am, yeah,” Bucky agrees, taking one slow step forward and kneeling on the floor a few feet away. “Can I touch you?”

Swallowing, Steve nods, or tries to. Bucky knee-walks closer and reaches out to put his hand on Steve’s shin. Steve looks up at him—sees the blood on his lips, blinks and it’s gone—and reaches for him.

“C’mere, yeah,” Bucky says as Steve clutches at him and tries to climb onto the slope of his lap. While Steve sticks his face into his shoulder, Bucky wiggles, clearly trying to make his lap a better place to sit. They overbalance and tip and tumble to the floor. “Shit.”

Steve curls up as small as he can get and scoots in again. The scar under his collarbone is aching and so is his elbow, and now that Bucky’s touching him he realizes he’s shaking. As Bucky wraps both arms around him, he shuts his eyes, feeling Bucky’s heart beat against his forehead. He sets his breath to the rhythm of it, to the slow calming glide of Bucky’s hand in his hair, and drifts.

He stirs when the hand in his hair stops stroking; he doesn’t know how long they’ve been lying there, but his side is starting to get sore from the hardwood and he’s stopped trembling. Looking at Bucky feels like something he’s not ready to do, but it doesn’t seem to matter. “Let’s get back in bed, okay?” Bucky says, his voice brushing across Steve’s scalp. He presses a kiss to Steve’s hairline and loosens his arms, letting Steve sit up first.

The sheets are cool when he climbs back into them, and he busies himself with putting them back to rights so that he doesn’t get caught watching Bucky climb in too. When Bucky flips off the light and lies down facing him, he fidgets with the sheets a little more, and then lies down with his back to him. He can’t look at his face right now, and he doesn’t really want Bucky to see his. He doesn’t know what he looks like, if his panic is still written in the lines of his mouth, if Bucky would be able to see how he feels about him. It would be hard to justify the amount of terror he feels without explaining the dream, and he doesn’t think that’s a good idea.

Hugging himself, he hunches his shoulders down a little more, tucks one foot over the other. He doesn’t know what time it is—it’s dark as hell in the room—but he doesn’t think he’ll be sleeping much more tonight. He lets out a long slow breath, quiet, trying not to bother Bucky.

An arm slides around his waist, Bucky’s body tucking up warm against his back. “Okay?” he asks, his forehead against the back of Steve’s neck.

Steve clears his throat. “Yeah.”

Bucky rubs his palm against Steve’s sternum in response. “That’s it,” he murmurs. “Just breathe.” Finally, Steve closes his eyes, doubting that he’ll sleep any more tonight.

 

Skirting the edges of the buildings, trying to keep to the shade, Steve lets Bucky pull him along toward their apartment. They’ve managed for most of their trip so far to stay out of the hottest part of the day, but today they’re stuck in it, on their way back from the royal palace.

They’re standing under an eave, waiting for the stoplight to change, when Steve catches sight of an ad nearby that features six huge stars in rainbow colors. It’s advertising something for today. “What’s that for?” he asks, pointing to it when Bucky looks around.

He watches as Bucky reads the thing, swinging their joined hands a little between them. He can guess. “Pride,” Bucky says, taking the bottle of sparkling water that Steve’s carrying and sipping from it before handing it back. Steve waits, not wanting to ask if they can go, knowing that a huge crowd like that isn’t likely to thrill Bucky. “It starts at six. You want to go check it out?” When Steve smiles, wide as he has in ages, Bucky grins back. “I’ll take that as a yes. Let’s head home and change.”

All the way home Steve’s so nervous he feels sick, his stomach jumping with every step. Bucky seems not to notice that he’s actually shaking. He’s never missed Pride in New York, not since he was about seventeen. He hadn’t realized that he was quite so sad about missing it until just now. It won’t be the same here, he knows it; but, well, beggars can’t be choosers and all.

Even so, he hasn’t been in a crowd as large as this one since they left the airport. He’s—for lack of a better word—jittery about it, and pays no attention whatsoever to their walk back. It’s not until Bucky pulls him around and cups his cheek in one hand that he even really realizes they’re there. He swallows and lets Bucky look at him.

“Tell me what you’re thinking about,” Bucky says. His hand is still on Steve’s cheek, the other holding his hand. There can’t be more than a foot between them. Steve can smell the espresso on his breath.

He opens his mouth, trying to decide what to say. It probably shouldn’t be any of those things. “Will it be dangerous?” he asks. “Pride, I mean.”

Bucky’s eyes drop for a moment. Steve half-wonders if he’s looking at his lips. “I don’t think so,” he finally says. His hand slips from Steve’s face to his shoulder and Steve becomes aware that they’re still standing just inside the front door, shoes still on, the apartment quiet behind him. “Trying to get to you during a parade would be dangerous and stupid. There would probably be a lot of collateral damage, and that comes with attention.”

The flutter in Steve’s throat calms, just a bit. “What about pictures?”

Bucky rocks back on his heels and finally looks away from Steve, looking over his shoulder as if he’s measuring the sun’s angle through the apartment. He lets go of Steve’s hand, sticks both of his into his pockets. “My plan was to get your face all painted. And then, um,” he clears his throat, “well, if anyone pointed a camera at us, I thought—you know—I could kiss you. With the, um, the colors, and my hands all over your face…I don’t think anyone would be able to, you know, to recognize you.”

They’ll rarely, Steve thinks, be _not_ kissing. He finds his voice after a moment: “That sounds. I mean. That should work.”

For a long moment they look at each other without actually making eye contact. Finally Bucky turns and wanders a few steps into the apartment. “I’m going to change,” he says over his shoulder. “The sooner you’re ready, the sooner we can go.”

That spurs Steve into moving, even though his brain is still thinking about all of the kissing they’ll be doing. He spends longer than planned trying to choose between two shirts. Neither is his traditional Pride shirt, a short-sleeved button-up covered in pineapples that the first boy he’d kissed had torn the buttons off while getting him out of it. That one is probably in a box in his childhood bedroom. He hopes, suddenly, that his mom hasn’t started to clean out his stuff.

It’s only when Bucky pokes his head in that Steve realizes he’s been sitting on the bed holding a shirt in each hand for nearly twenty minutes. “Sorry,” he says when Bucky raises his eyebrows at him. “Sorry, I—I. Can you help me choose a shirt?”

Bucky—who’s changed into one of the white tank tops he wears as an undershirt and a pair of hot pink shorts that Steve’s never seen before—walks over. Completely unnecessarily, he runs a warm hand through Steve’s hair before plucking at the shirt in Steve’s left hand, a grey one with a big anchor on the front.

“This one?” Steve asks, getting to his feet. Bucky nods. The arm that Steve knows is metal is cloaked, as it always is, in some kind of flesh-colored hologram. Steve reaches out, traces the edge of Bucky’s tank top where his skin looks smooth. He can feel the scars, the seam where the arm connects to his body. When he looks up into Bucky’s face, he’s looking back, his lips just barely parted. Steve swallows. He wants to say something; something about how strong Bucky must have been to have survived it. But Bucky’s eyes are steady on him, waiting, and Steve can feel through his fingertips against his skin the gentle tremor in Bucky’s muscles. Steve swallows. “Um. Okay. I’ll just. Just go and change.”

They don’t say much as they leave the apartment again, Steve too busy wondering what Bucky might have been thinking in that moment in the bedroom. It’s still hot; they walk toward the Plaza de Colón mostly in silence, holding hands as they’ve become used to. It feels like nothing and at the same time like everything; the same as it had felt yesterday, and also much more. Still, Steve doesn’t let go. He’s wondered, at times, if this is all some elaborate dream; but if nothing else, Bucky’s palm against his feels real against his. They’re still a few blocks away when they start to hear the parade—music, the sound of a crowd. Steve, his belly twisting, tugs Bucky on, and suddenly they turn a corner and they’re there: the sun still strong above them, the crush of a thousand bodies around them, the sway of music.

Winding through the crowd, Steve lets Bucky take the lead, lets him pull him along by the hand away from the plaza, deeper and deeper into the jubilant press. They veer to the left suddenly; Bucky begins speaking in rapid Spanish to a person sitting on a low wall, face paints spread beside them. While Bucky talks to them, Steve looks around, nerves still prickling, but less, less in this place. He hadn’t expected it to feel this way, to feel so much like Pride back home.

A tug on his hand makes him look around: Bucky is sitting beside the face painter, letting them paint a rainbow in horizontal lines over his nose and across both cheekbones. “You’re next,” he says to Steve, looking at him from the corner of his eye and smiling, hand pulling Steve’s closer so he can kiss it. If Steve didn’t know he was just putting on a show, he might have thought that Bucky was actively trying to keep his attention on him.

The face painter finishes with Bucky in just a few moments, and Steve switches spots with him. The face painter speaks more rapid Spanish at Bucky while painting Steve’s face—much more than they’d done for Bucky, his whole face covered like he’s a fan at a football game—but it’s only once they’re walking again, once Steve and Bucky have ducked into the edge of the flow where it’s calmest and turned their faces up for a selfie, that Steve is able to ask what the face painter had been saying.

“They said—” Bucky isn’t looking at him, is instead watching the crowd move—“they said they thought we made a cute couple.”

Steve blinks at the side of Bucky’s face, too stunned to hide the fact that he’s looking. If he’s honest with himself, he might have wondered how they looked to others; just once or twice, wondered if they made a good match. He’s never thought about how his mother might like Bucky—but that’s mostly because the thought of her still makes him recoil like he would from a flame.

He’s taking a breath in to say something—though he’s not sure what, exactly—when Bucky abruptly turns to him, a sly grin spreading over his mouth. Steve doesn’t have time to ask what he’s thinking before Bucky’s hand is sliding around his neck, drawing him in to a slow kiss that Steve feels in the arches of his feet.

Bucky’s tongue nudges at his lips, his hand shifting his head to a better angle as his other arm wraps around Steve’s waist, pressing their bodies tight together. Steve gasps, and he doesn’t know quite how it happens but suddenly his arms are tight around Bucky’s shoulders, his back against a shop window. Bucky kisses the breath from his lungs, steering his chin around, tugging on his lower lip with his teeth.

Struggling to think over the frantic buzzing in his brain, kept from popping a stiffy only because he can feel the closeness of so many people around them, Steve thinks how they must look, the two of them, twined together so closely. Does the way Bucky cradles Steve’s face, his thumb tracing the corner of his mouth, look as tender as it feels? The way they fit together, the way Steve’s arm rests around Bucky’s shoulders—does it look convincing? Can anyone tell that Steve’s aching to crawl into Bucky and never leave?

Finally they part to breathe. Steve opens his eyes, tipping his head back just enough that his nose nudges Bucky’s. He takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself, reminding himself that this is all an elaborate show; finally he looks up.

Bucky is looking at him too. His eyes are half-lidded, dark on Steve’s mouth. He’s breathing hard. When their eyes meet, Bucky gives a half-smile, leans in and presses one more tender kiss to Steve’s lower lip. “Saw a camera,” he says. Steve swallows and nods. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, proud of the fact that his voice only barely cracks. “I’m good, yeah.”

His mouth slippery-looking and wet, Bucky smiles at Steve. “Okay,” he says. “Should we keep walking?”

Steve swallows, resisting the urge to bite his lip, which is still tingling. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for a second, thinking that his face could literally be on fire and he wouldn’t know the difference, and nods.

They walk on, following the flow of the crowd, keeping to the edge the whole time. They don’t speak much—the music is too loud, Steve doesn’t know what he’d say—but the only time Bucky lets go of his hand is to take off his shirt and hook it through his belt loop. The sun turns, leaving no shade to escape to, and Bucky stops to buy them some kind of alcoholic lemon ice from a vendor that they pass set up on the side of the road.

Bucky ducks his head to let people throw Mardi Gras beads around his neck until he’s rattling and sparkling as they walk. They kiss, and kiss again, and again, Steve losing his footing a little more each time, dizzier and dizzier every time Bucky’s mouth meets his, his warm sticky skin under Steve’s hands. Each time their lips meet, Bucky slips one of his bead chains over his head and around Steve’s neck, until he’s got his own rainbow of shine. They even dance, waylaid from the forward motion of the parade by loud music and an eddy in the flow, though it’s mostly just swaying on the spot, surrounded by other people doing the same thing. Bucky’s arm stays wrapped around Steve’s stomach, his mouth at Steve’s ear, Steve’s hand at the back of his neck, their hips circling to the beat of some Spanish jam while everyone around them sings along at the top of their lungs. Bucky spins him under his arm—twice, three times, four—and Steve’s insides feel like air, delight bubbling and joyous in his throat, and he can’t stop laughing as he stumbles, dizzy, into Bucky’s chest.

Laughing warmly in Steve’s ear, Bucky catches him, both hands at the small of his back, and sways with him, kissing at the side of Steve’s head when he tucks his face into the warm salty spot where Bucky’s neck meets his shoulder. Hot everywhere, unsure if it’s because of the sun or Bucky’s fingertips bracketing his spine, Steve sinks, reveling, into the music.

Finally Steve sees a small patch of empty shade under a balcony and drags Bucky into it. He leans against the warm stone wall and ignores Bucky’s hand on his hip, his thumb under Steve’s shirt. “ _Fuck_ , it’s hot,” Steve says, tipping his head back against the wall.

“Take off your shirt,” Bucky suggests, tugging on its hem, smiling flirtatiously.

Before he can stop himself, Steve’s eyes trace the place he knows Bucky’s arm joins with his skin, where he knows by touch that there are ripples of scar tissue that branch out almost all the way to his neck. Not for the first time, he wishes he had some kind of cloaking device like that for the scar on his shoulder. He looks away, across the boulevard, where there’s a few women wearing sequined bikinis handing out strips of condoms. “No, I’m fine,” he says.

Bucky cocks his head to look at him; Steve chews on his lip and resolutely does not look back. “Okay,” Bucky finally says, quiet, letting go of Steve’s shirt and reaching up to comb a hand through his hair. His thumb pets at the sensitive spot in front of Steve’s ear. “Do you need something else to drink?”

Something inside him goes wobbly and he squeezes his eyes shut behind his sunglasses for a moment. The loud music is suddenly too much, the crowd, the heat, the bittersweet feeling of being welcomed here and missing New York—“Will you take me home?” he asks. “Please, I—I want to go home.”

Without speaking, Bucky pulls him away from the wall and they push their way, against the current, to the nearest side street. It’s cooler here, quieter, and the tightness constricting Steve’s chest eases, just a little. Bucky leads him by the hand away from the party, toward their apartment, turning to look at him every few steps like he’s worried Steve’s going to pass out. He even stops and buys Steve a cold bottle of water from a café, pulling his shirt back on before he walks in like he’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing it until just that moment.

When they get home, Steve kicks off his shoes and then goes to sit on the couch, still trying to scrape his emotions into something coherent. He sips on the water because he knows he should, even if he doesn’t feel thirsty. His body actually doesn’t feel like much of anything, except maybe a little tingly on the edges of the numb strip down his arm.

“Do you—do you want to talk?” Bucky asks, moving around the sofa without touching Steve and sitting at the other end of it.

Even if he did, Steve doesn’t know what he might say. He shakes his hand, fiddling with a loose thread on the sofa’s arm. He can hear Bucky swallow, sees him nod from the corner of his eye.

“Okay. That’s fine. I’m going to go pick up some stuff for dinner, okay? I won’t be long, and you can text me if you need anything.” He waits for Steve to nod before getting up again, walking to the foyer and putting his shoes on before coming back. “Steve, I…”

When he doesn’t finish his sentence, Steve looks up at him, still standing there, tension in the line of his shoulders. The rainbow across his nose is mostly gone, erased by sweat and kissing.

“Never mind,” Bucky says, shaking his head. “I’ll—I’ll be back soon.”

 

When Steve wakes the next morning, he’s alone in the bed. He should be hungry, he knows—he’d skipped dinner the night before, conspiring to be showered and in bed before Bucky’d gotten back from the store—but he still isn’t. There’s a cup of coffee steaming on the bedside table next to him, but he doesn’t even want that. Rolling over, he shuts his eyes again, indulging himself for a moment and wishing Bucky were next to him, an arm thrown over his waist.

He nods off again, replaying the tactile memory of Bucky’s hands at the small of his back, the heat and the crowd and the music. Eventually he wakes again and listens to the quiet sounds of Bucky typing away on his laptop through the open door to the living room. The coffee cup is gone.

Finally, he hears Bucky push back his chair, the light snap as he closes his computer, the whisper of his bare feet on the hardwood as he comes into the bedroom. Having no desire at all to speak, Steve shuts his eyes and pretends to be asleep.

He’s so intent on keeping up the act that he doesn’t notice Bucky coming nearer, not until the mattress dips at Steve’s side. “When you’re ready to get up, there’s another museum I want to take you to,” Bucky says without preamble, clearly perfectly aware that Steve’s faking. “And you need to eat something.”

Since it’s no use pretending anymore, Steve opens his eyes. He doesn’t turn to look at Bucky, still not sure that he can without thinking of the press of his mouth, the scent of him.

“There you are,” Bucky says. He rubs Steve’s shoulder. “We can skip the museum today if it’s too much. But you really do need to eat.”

Steve closes his eyes again, just for a moment. If truth be told, a museum sounds wonderful: somewhere he can go where he won’t be made to maintain eye contact, or talk; not to mention that museums are therapeutic anyway. He swallows, and opens his eyes once more. “Which museum?” he asks.

“The Thyssen. I’m saving the Reina Sofía for last. I think you’ll like it best.” His thumb rubs a small circle on Steve’s arm, just below his sleeve.

“Don’t,” Steve says, before he can stop himself.

Immediately, Bucky’s hand pulls away. Steve holds his breath. “Steve?” he asks. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Steve tries to curl up tighter; his knees hit Bucky’s back. He doesn’t know how to say it: _I’m falling for you_ or _yesterday you kissed me until it felt real_ or _are you feeling it too?_

“Yesterday was a lot, huh?” Bucky finally murmurs. Steve squeezes his eyes closed so he doesn’t have to watch Bucky break his heart. “I’m sorry. Pride is my favorite time of year, too. We got a bit carried away, didn’t we?”

“No,” Steve says, surprising even himself. He sits up, manages to look Bucky in the face; he’s watching Steve with that look that he gets sometimes, like he can read his mind. “I—we have a cover to keep.”

Bucky just looks at him for a moment. “Yeah,” he says. “We do.”

“I just.” Steve fiddles with the sheet. “I just miss home.”

For a long second, Bucky doesn’t speak. “I understand.” He gets up. “Let’s get your mind off it, okay? Let’s go to the Thyssen.”

 

The Reina Sofía is so lovely that Steve and Bucky get ejected at the end of their first day there having seen only half of it; they return the next day and Steve manages to keep his distance from Bucky, just a little. Bucky, without their discussing it, seems to understand; he stops doing anything more than holding Steve’s hand, and only when they’re absolutely somewhere that they’ll be seen. Steve misses it, misses him; but it helps, for now.

They’re returning from the Reina Sofía when it happens. Bucky unlocks the front door and, hand at Steve’s back, lets him walk first into the apartment.

Steve kicks off his shoes and puts down his gift shop bag, thinking about a glass of water and then maybe a shower. He turns—and steps directly into a black bag.

There’s a thump behind him and he hears Bucky swear, and then the bag is pulled tight at his throat. His breath is hot and damp against the fabric and he stumbles as whoever’s holding him pulls, jerking him backward. He panics, thrashing, but the person is strong and he can hear scuffling, Bucky fighting someone else. The crumpled fabric at his throat is cutting off his airways and then—lungs burning, color exploding behind his eyes—clarity hits.

Steve spins on his heel, grabbing his attacker’s wrists at the sides of his neck and jerking his head forward, blind. Pain shatters over his face as his nose breaks, blood gushing into his open mouth, choking him. But his attacker yells. His grip loosens; when Steve sinks his knee into the soft spot between the man’s legs, he lets go completely. Steve manages to stumble back, gasping for breath, scrabbling so fast to get the bag off his head that he rips out some of his own hair. It drags over his broken nose, pulls blood through his eyelashes, but it’s better than the complete darkness of the bag, the lack of oxygen.

Bucky’s engaged in tight-quarters combat with another black-dressed man. This is like something out of a movie. Steve makes it to the counter, to the kitchen sink, where a big chef’s knife that he’d used to cut melon that morning is still sitting. He grabs it and starts slashing, lashing out like Bucky’d taught him. _Don’t hesitate_ , he’d said, _just keep swinging. It’ll keep him away from you._

The man grunts, stumbling forward on bowlegs, and Steve gropes behind him for another knife, a smaller serrated one, and while the man eyes him warily, he advances on him. The man retreats, and retreats, and Bucky shoves his opponent into him, knocking him sideways.

Steve watches, hesitating, not wanting to slash Bucky instead of the attacker, and starting to panic again as he has a second to think. Bucky, luckily, isn’t panicking; he smashes one attacker’s head into the wall, knocking him out, and then thumps the other on the back of the head.

He crumples to the floor, and Steve does too, his knees giving out. The knives clatter as they hit the linoleum. He watches as Bucky checks on the men, making sure they’re both out cold. He crosses to the counter and pulls open a drawer, extracting two long zipties and cuffing the men’s wrists behind their backs. Then, kneeling, he digs in one man’s pocket, pulling out a cell phone and tapping away at it for a few seconds. He crawls over to where Steve’s sitting and doing nothing except shake in his boots.

“Steve,” he says, quiet. The door is still open. “Steve, are you okay?” He looks at Bucky, and opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. Bucky’s hand grips the back of his neck. “I’m going to set your nose, okay? It’s going to hurt. Breathe, just breathe.” His thumbs come up to bracket his nose. Steve just stares at him, and then suddenly, the pain in his nose peaks and he coughs, spitting blood all over Bucky.

“Sorry,” he gasps. “Sorry, I’m sorry.” His hand grabs for Bucky’s wrist, trying to steady himself, a parody of his defense from earlier. He chances a look at the two men lying on the floor. “Fuck.”

Bucky laughs. “Yeah,” he agrees, peering at Steve’s throat, his thumb running over the line where the bag had been drawn tight. Grimacing, he sits back, letting go of Steve’s neck and taking his hand instead. “ _Shit_. Yeah. Fuck.” He lasts only a few seconds before getting up, tugging on Steve’s hand. “Come on. I know you want to rest, but we need to get cleaned up and get out of here. We’re compromised.”


	2. Home

They’re out the door in ten minutes flat, their faces scrubbed clean of Steve’s blood, his belongings tossed hastily into his suitcase. Bucky’s slung his duffel bag over his shoulder, his hand stuffed in the main pocket, gripping his gun, Steve knows. His other hand holds Steve’s tight as they creep down the hall and into the elevator.

“We need to check on Marta,” Bucky tells him, barely whispering as they wait for the elevator to lumber its way downward. Steve watches the stairwell spiral upward around them. He’s met the old woman with the dog a few times now. She doesn’t speak English, but it’s very clear what she’s saying when she glares at him and puts ever more food on the table, scolding the both of them for eating too little all the while.

Her door is ajar. Bucky swears and drags Steve faster down the hall, into her apartment. Steve’s feet feel like concrete; dread grows in his chest.

The dog is muzzled and tied to the doorknob, leash tight enough that the door hits it when they walk in, nudging it out of the way. “ _Fuck_ ,” Bucky says again.

Marta is on the floor in the kitchen. “Is she…” Steve whispers. Bucky’s already crouching beside her, checking her pulse.

“She’s alive,” he says. “They must have knocked her out before she alerted me.” He nudges the seniors’ alert button she wears around her neck, now lying on the floor next to her face. “If she’d pressed this, it would have sent me a warning.” For a second, he stays crouched there beside her prone form, scratching at his hair. Then he stands and pulls his phone from his pocket. “Untie the dog, okay? I’ll call for help on the way out of here.”

Steve fumbles with the leash, his fingers shaking. The dog whines at him, pawing at his knee, and when he finally gets it untied it turns tail and heads for its owner. He watches as Bucky stands and picks up his bag.

They leave Marta there on the floor, her dog nosing at her face. Bucky tells him there are people on their way to help her, that she’ll learn what happened when she wakes, and that it’s far more urgent for them to vanish.

The next thing Steve knows, they’re in a car—a Mini that had been parked right outside their building—their bags stuffed into the trunk, heading northeast. “Where are we going?” Steve asks as they pull onto the highway.

Bucky shifts gears and lets his grip on the steering wheel loosen. “There’s another safehouse up north. We’re going to switch cars on our way up. We’ll lie low there and wait for contact,” he says. He sighs and rubs his fingers over his mouth. “God, I could use a cigarette.”

“You smoke?” Steve asks. How had he not noticed before this?

Bucky grimaces. “Not anymore,” he says. “Not really.” Tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, he chews at his lips. “Jesus, but sometimes.” He lets a long breath out through his nose, then glances at Steve. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” Steve says, but Bucky side-eyes him as if he knows it’s not true. He rubs both hands over his face and sinks lower in his seat. His knees hit the dashboard. “Shit. They couldn’t have left us a bigger car?”

“Don’t change the subject. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

“My head hurts,” he says.

Reaching behind Steve’s seat, Bucky pulls his backpack out and drops it in Steve’s lap. “There’s ibuprofen in the front pocket.” He points at the glovebox. “Water in there.”

They’re leaving the city limits by the time Steve shoves Bucky’s bag back behind their seats. He settles back down and lets out a long breath. Sighing, he rolls his head on the headrest to look at Bucky. “I never asked. You’re—you’re okay, aren’t you? You’re not hurt?”

Bucky laughs and reaches over to run a hand through Steve’s hair. He pulls him in until he’s leaning his body on the center console between them, his head on his shoulder. “I’m fine. It takes more than a couple of thugs to get me.” Swallowing, Steve closes his eyes, lets himself have this, have Bucky’s arm around his waist, for now.

 

They get barely twelve hours to recuperate. It’s late by the time they arrive at the next safehouse, in a tiny village that Bucky says is on the border to France. There is nobody around to notice as they park, unload, and head for the cover of a small farmhouse nearby. Instead of going out to eat, they scrounge a small meal of bread and cheese.

Steve thinks he might have a hard time falling asleep, but he’s out the moment his head hits the pillow. He sleeps all the way through until Bucky shakes him awake next morning. His head still hurts, and he takes two more painkillers with his coffee.

“We’re heading to Paris today,” Bucky tells him. “As soon as you’re ready, we’ll head out.”

Steve looks up from the orange he’s peeling. “What? Why?”

For a long second, Bucky just looks at him; then he pulls out the chair across from Steve’s and sits. “We’re going back to New York.”

His head rocks back. He feels like he’s actually been hit. “I—what?”

“They’ve bumped up the trial,” Bucky says. “We thought you were safe, but you’re not—so SHIELD’s calling you back early to testify.”

Steve swallows, then swallows again. His mouth is suddenly very dry, and he struggles to take in a breath. Leaning over the table, Bucky nudges the back of his hand against Steve’s fist clutching his coffee mug. Without really thinking about it, Steve picks it up and sips.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I…” Steve looks out the window, not knowing what to say. New York. They’re going home. He’s going to see his mother. “Will it be safe?”

Bucky grips Steve’s wrist tight. “I’ll stay with you until the whole cell has been sent off to prison.”

“What about my ma?” Steve asks, panicking now, his breath coming fast. “My friends? What happens when I show my face in that city and they go after everyone I care about?”

Bucky gives him a half-smile. “I’ve already put in a request to get them moved somewhere safe.” His thumb rubs over the back of Steve’s hand. “They’ll be okay, Steve.”

The smile on Bucky’s face is probably meant to be comforting, or something, but Steve jerks his hand back, nearly spilling his coffee all over himself. “How can you know that?” he snaps. Five seconds ago he hadn’t known he was angry, but now—his cheeks are hot. He gets up and walks to the end of the kitchen and back. “How can you be so sure? You were sure we were safe in Madrid, and now—” he stops, closing his eyes for a second, his fingers straying to his throat. His heart is pounding hard behind his nose.

“Steve.” Bucky’s hand slips into the crook of Steve’s elbow. “I’m sorry about yesterday. But believe me. Your mother is safe.” His arm wraps around Steve’s waist. “Come sit, huh?”

When Bucky tugs, Steve doesn’t move. “How can you know?” he asks again.

“They assigned my best friend to your mom and the others,” Bucky explains. “And she’s the best of us.”

“Where was she when I needed protecting?”

Bucky’s hands release him. “On another job.” There’s a moment’s pause; Steve can tell Bucky’s wounded by his question, but he can’t quite bring himself to care at the moment. Maybe later he’ll admit that he’s glad the best of the best is taking care of his mother. “We should get out of here soon. You want to shower? I’ll get the car loaded up.”

 

Their flight touches down in the dark, just the narrowest edge of pale grey visible at the horizon where the sun had set. Steve’s belly is tied into a series of knots, each tighter than the one before it. The city glitters in the distance. Somewhere there, his mother is waiting for him to come home. Somewhere there, someone is waiting to kill him.

He lets Bucky lead him off the plane, through the airport and to a car parked in the short-term lot. He stands and breathes the hot sticky New York air until Bucky asks for his help loading their bags.

“How are you feeling?” Bucky asks as they get into the car and pull out of the space.

Steve wonders, for a moment, where and when he got the keys to this car. But he has more pressing problems right now. “I’m,” he says. He stops and looks out his window while Bucky leans out of the driver’s side window to pay, swallows hard.

“There should be—” Bucky twists in his seat, digging around in the backseat for a moment and coming up with a water bottle that he drops in Steve’s lap. “Have some water, Steve.”

At a loss for anything else to do, Steve opens the bottle and takes a long drink. He watches out the window as the city looms ahead of them. “Will I get to see my mom tonight?” he asks, the words spilling out of him without thought. “Does she know I’m not…does she know I’m alive?”

Bucky doesn’t answer for so long that Steve thinks he won’t. “I don’t know,” he says, finally, looking over his shoulder as they merge onto the highway. “We’ll be heading to the same safehouse that she’s in, but it’s late. They may not have mentioned you, if they thought she might behave erratically; they might just have told her she isn’t safe because of a revenge plot or something. If that’s what they’ve told her, she might be asleep by now.”

That’s fair—Steve wouldn’t want to wake his mother. She needs all the rest she can get. Bed-Stuy passes to their right, Brooklyn on their left, and if he’d expected to turn off and head for Red Hook it had only been for half a second. Still, as they take the overpass that leads to the Brooklyn Bridge, he looks at his hands in his lap. After a second, Bucky’s hand slips into his.

“You’ll be home soon,” he says softly. “Soon enough, all of this will be over.”

Steve stares down at Bucky’s hand holding his. Soon enough, Bucky will be leaving, off on another job, pretending to be in love with someone else. Kissing them. Holding their hand. Soothing them after a nightmare.

He sinks a little lower in his seat and rests his head on the car door, trying not to clutch too hard to Bucky’s fingers.

 

They pull over on a narrow street in the Lower East Side. On their left is a nondescript block of walk-ups; on their right, a school. For a moment, they sit in silence, looking out. “Ready?” Bucky finally asks, squeezing Steve’s hand.

He takes a deep breath, lets it out slow. “Yeah,” he says. It doesn’t feel true, but he can’t stay in this car forever. He watches from the corner of his eye as Bucky turns to look at him, but he doesn’t look back, not sure what Bucky would see in his face if he did.

“Okay,” Bucky says, and shoulders open his door.

The cool, air-conditioned atmosphere in the car changes in a split second. The heat sticks to Steve’s skin as Bucky lets go of his hand and climbs out. It smells like New York, now, and Steve can’t move for a moment, breathing it in. Then Bucky opens the door on his side, and he unbuckles his seatbelt and gets out on autopilot.

“Think we can make it in one trip?” Bucky asks as he pulls their bags out of the trunk. He passes over Steve’s backpack, unloads their three suitcases onto the curb.

“I—sure,” Steve says; if his mother is awake, he won’t want to come back down, and if she’s asleep, he may be too crushed to come back down. One trip seems like a good idea. He slings his backpack over his shoulder and picks up two of the bags.

Bucky leads the way into the building—more keys from places unknown—and up the stairs, and up, and up, until they reach the top floor and the last apartment. Bucky turns to look at Steve, but he can’t look away from that door, the crooked brass number 6B. “Are you ready?” he asks again.

Steve swallows and opens his mouth to say yes. “No.”

Putting down the suitcase he’s been lugging, Bucky turns. He takes Steve’s hand and walks him back to the stairs, where he takes a seat on the top step and pulls Steve down next to him. “We don’t have to go in if you’re not ready,” he says. “Not yet.”

“She’s in there,” Steve says. “We’re back in New York, and my mom is in there.”

“That’s right.” When Steve doesn’t speak again, Bucky nudges him. “Hey. What’s going on in there? Tell me what you’re feeling.”

“I shouldn’t have come back,” Steve says, surprising even himself. “It isn’t safe. She isn’t safe with me here.”

Bucky puts an arm around his shoulders. “She’s a lot safer in this building than she was in Brooklyn,” he points out. “You’ll both stay here where it’s safe until the trial ends. And I’ll be here. And my best friend—the one I told you about? With the foot strangling? She’ll be here too.” Steve stares straight ahead and tries to breathe. “Let’s go in. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

Letting himself be pulled up again, Steve follows Bucky on leaden feet to the door. Bucky knocks quietly—one-two-three-pause-pause-four-five-pause-six—and pushes the key into the lock—twists—opens the door and steps in.

Steve stands there, looking at the entrance. Bucky doesn’t seem to notice right away; he moves the suitcases into the foyer and then turns, steps back out, pulls Steve inside.

The place is small—den to the left, kitchen to the right, a door on each side of the hall and what looks to be a bathroom at the end. There’s a lamp lit in the den, but it’s empty. The light over the sink in the kitchen is on, a red-haired woman standing by the fridge looking at them.

Steve’s mother is standing in the doorway.

She takes a step forward, then two, one hand on her chest. “Ma,” Steve says. He can barely breathe.

She recoils, stepping backward into the kitchen and collapsing into a chair at the table. Steve dumps his bag and follows her, kneeling at her feet. “Ma,” he says again.

With a shaking hand, she reaches out as if to touch his face, but pauses, her fingertips inches from his forehead as if she’s not sure he’s actually there. She says his name, her voice a broken whisper, and Steve, tears burning the base of his throat, reaches up and takes her hand.

Her face crumples. She squeezes Steve’s fingers so hard they hurt, her other hand gripping at the back of his neck. “Ma,” he whispers, like it’s the only word he knows. She folds, pressing her forehead to his, and they’re both crying.

“I’m here, Ma, I’m home, I’m alive,” he says, gasping with how tight she’s holding him. She holds onto him until both of their sobs have subsided, and after, stroking his hair with one hand, examining him with bleary eyes that continue to leak tears. He rests his cheek on her knee, suddenly so exhausted he can barely keep his eyes open, but not wanting to go to sleep in case it’s all gone when he wakes.

He watches as Bucky crosses to the sink and fills two glasses with water. The woman is still standing near the fridge, watching them. Despite it all, despite his mother, Steve finds himself painfully aware of Bucky. “Why are you limping?” Steve asks as Bucky walks toward them, reaching up to take the proffered glass of water.

“You dropped your bag on my foot,” Bucky tells him. When he ruffles Steve’s hair, Steve presses his face against the side of his mother’s thigh, hiding the blush creeping over his nose. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Rogers. You can call me Bucky. Steve’s told me lots about you.”

The look she gives him is priceless. “I can call you— _what_ , now?”

While Steve snickers behind his hand, Bucky grins at her. “Your son asked me the same thing. Bucky. It’s short for Buchanan.”

“I can’t call you that,” she says.

“My first name is James. You could call me that instead?” Bucky suggests.

She nods and stands, jostling Steve’s head so that he knocks his teeth into the water glass. He watches from the floor as she hugs Bucky tight around the neck. “You brought my boy back to me,” she says, muffled in his shirt. “Thank you.”

Steve scrubs at his face and rests his head on the chair, sipping on the water, trying to stay awake. The red-haired woman finally moves, leaning sideways so she and Steve can make eye contact. “I’m Natasha, by the way,” she says. “I’ve been taking care of your mom.”

“Steve,” Steve replies. “Can you really strangle someone with your feet?”

Bucky laughs, still patting Steve’s mom on the back. “Will you ever quit telling people my secret?” Natasha asks him.

“Never,” he says. He looks over at Steve, who’s mid-yawn, so tired he’s thinking about falling asleep right there on the floor. Bucky chuckles and gently pulls Steve’s mom’s arms from around his neck. “Mrs. Rogers, I think it’s time we tuck your boy into bed.”

Letting Bucky pull him to his feet, Steve finishes his water and puts the glass down on the table. “Are we—” Steve clears his throat—“are we supposed to be keeping our cover?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I’m sorry, I know you were probably looking forward to having a bed all to yourself again.”

In truth, Steve hadn’t even thought of that. He’d been a bit busy wondering how he would deal with the nightmares without Bucky to wake him. “Soon enough,” he says. “Remember?”

Bucky nods, his eyes steady on Steve’s face. Steve’s mother is looking at him too, he can feel it; but he thinks, at least, that Natasha is looking at Bucky. “Mrs. Rogers,” Natasha finally says, and Steve breaks eye contact with Bucky. “Let’s head back across the hall. These two could use some rest, huh?”

Steve’s heart dips; he’d sort of been hoping to keep his mother nearby. “I want to stay here,” his mother says. He grins, glad she feels the same way. “There’s a spare bedroom, isn’t there?”

“I’ll be up keeping watch either way,” Natasha says. “Let’s go get what you’ll need for tonight, Mrs. R., while Steve and Bucky get ready for bed.”

While Steve brushes his teeth, Bucky stands in the bathroom doorway, watching him. “I don’t know what I was picturing,” he says, “but she isn’t it.” When Steve looks at him askance, he puts his hands up in defense, palms forward. “Not in a bad way! I just—Steve, _look_ at you. I expected you to come from—I don’t know—hardier stock.”

Steve laughs, the sound echoing in the bowl of the sink as he spits. “I grew up with bird bones,” he says. “Thank god for puberty, or I might have been carried away in a stiff breeze.”

“Thank god for puberty,” Bucky repeats, so quiet Steve almost misses it under the running water.

They switch spots; Steve changes while Bucky brushes his teeth, and he’s just pulling the curtains shut in the bedroom when his mother returns. He turns to find her folding back the bedcovers. He gets into bed when she waves for him to do so, letting her tuck the covers in at his chin and kiss his forehead, sleep already creeping over him.

“Ma,” he says, reaching for her as she gets up to leave. “Ma, I’m sorry. For—everything.”

“Oh, my sunshine boy,” she murmurs, leaning over him to pet at his hair and kiss his forehead one more time. Steve has to resist the urge to start sobbing all over again. “You’re home now, and no harm done.”

He breathes out, slow, and watches as she makes her way back to the door. She and Bucky pass one another in the doorway; he gives her a weak smile and, once he’s past her, makes a nervous face at Steve. “Goodnight, Mrs. R.,” he says over his shoulder.

“Goodnight, my boys,” she says, pulling the door shut behind herself.

Bucky climbs into bed too and switches off the lamp. For a few seconds, they lie there in silence, Steve letting himself drift, before Bucky speaks again, whispering into the dark: “Is she okay with this?”

“She bought me my first box of condoms when I was thirteen,” he replies. “And anyway, we’re not even doing anything.”

“Thirteen?” Bucky’s quiet laugh, somewhere to Steve’s right, makes him smile.

“She’s a nurse. It took four years for me to need to open the box, though,” he admits. “And then I had to get more like a week later.”

It feels like being a teenager again, lying there in the dark, quietly snickering. Steve stops for a second so he can yawn, and Bucky reaches over and pats him clumsily on the chest. “Okay. Goodnight, Steve.”

“Goodnight.”

He listens to Bucky yawn too. “I’m glad you got to see her tonight,” he mumbles. “I know how much you missed her.”

 

Steve is halfway lying on Bucky when he wakes, one leg thrown over Bucky’s, his nose bent against Bucky’s shoulder. Both of Bucky’s arms are tight around his waist.

He lets himself enjoy it for a moment, knowing that these experiences are numbered. Finally, though, he shifts away. As he moves, Bucky wakes, grumbling a little in his throat before opening his eyes to look at Steve. “Mornin’,” he mumbles, picking up one hand and rubbing his face with it, leaving the other around Steve’s waist. “Sleep well?”

Steve nods. “You?”

“Mm,” Bucky rolls in toward Steve and squeezes him tight for just a moment, yawning into the sensitive spot behind Steve’s ear. Steve freezes, not sure what to do. “Yeah. Real good.” He sits up and turns his back to Steve, putting his feet on the floor and rolling his neck with a groan. “Shit, it’s already ten o’clock.”

Steve stares at his back, wondering what to make of what just happened. He’d thought, maybe, that when they got home he’d be able to release Bucky, that it had been some side effect of being alone with him for so long. He might even have hoped for that. It’s clear, now, painfully so, that it will be harder than that to let Bucky go.

Still too stunned to speak or move, he watches as Bucky scratches at his shoulder and gets to his feet, as he shuffles toward the door, rubbing both hands through his hair. He opens the door and turns back to look at Steve, still in bed.

“You coming, or what?”

“What? I—yeah,” Steve says, sitting up. He clambers out of bed and follows Bucky to the door and out to the kitchen. Natasha and Steve’s mother are sitting at the table, talking quietly; both turn to look at them when they come in.  Steve walks over to kiss his mother good morning, then turns to take the cup of coffee Bucky’s poured him.

“Anything?” Bucky asks Natasha, sidestepping Steve and heading for the fridge. Steve, spying a loaf of raisin bread on the counter, heads that direction, untying the knot that he can tell his mother had tied.

“Nothing,” Natasha replies. “I’m off to bed, if you don’t need me anymore.”

They bid her goodnight as Steve arranges six slices of bread in the toaster oven—three for him, three for Bucky, since his mother has clearly already eaten—and turns to get the butter. Bucky catches him by the elbows, having come close to break a couple of bananas from their group. “Sorry,” Steve says, letting Bucky turn them. Bucky smiles at him.

His mother is looking at him when he turns to put the butter on the table next to his coffee, her eyes narrowed. He doesn’t look back.

Once they’re both sitting down, Steve slides half the raisin toast off his plate and onto Bucky’s, and Bucky passes over one of the bananas. “Am I allowed to ask where you’ve been all this time?” Steve’s mother says, both hands cupped around her mug of tea.

Steve looks at Bucky, not sure himself. Bucky shrugs a shoulder, three-quarters of a piece of toast in his mouth, his cheek bulging. “They sent us to Spain,” Steve tells her. He can’t stop the smile tugging at his lips.

“So far away,” she says. “What did you do for so long over there?”

In a way, Steve doesn’t want to tell her. For all that they had been so isolated, so far from everything he'd known and loved, now he feels like that time is private, something between himself and Bucky. Also, he’s pretty sure that if he starts talking, he’ll reveal that soft inner part of him that’s fallen so hopelessly for Bucky. So he folds the half-slice of raisin toast he’s holding and shoves the whole thing in his mouth, and after a moment, Bucky comes to the rescue.

“We went to a lot of museums,” he says. “Mrs. R.—we went to _so many museums_.”

Steve’s mother starts to laugh, reaching over to pet at the side of Steve’s head. He smiles around the toast, chewing slower than necessary so he doesn’t have to say anything. “He’s always been that way,” she says. “How many hours did we spend in the Smithsonian, Steve?” She turns to Bucky. “Ask me anything about Captain America—I know it all. He _loved_ that exhibit.”

“I don’t blame him. Captain America _is_ pretty cool,” Bucky says, nudging Steve’s ankle with the side of his foot. Steve tries not to choke. “What else did we do, Steve?”

“Toledo,” he says, and takes a careful sip of his coffee. “Um, Pride.”

Grinning brightly, Bucky starts to peel his banana. “Oh, right. That was pretty cool, huh?”

Steve nods, managing to stuff an entire piece of toast into his mouth. He definitely can’t talk about Pride; all he’d have words for would be the heat of Bucky under his hands, the pulse of the music, and the way their skin had stuck together.

“Without your Pride shirt?” Steve’s mother asks. Steve nods again, his mouth so full that he’s actually having trouble chewing. She takes his hand; he watches as she rubs her thumb over his knuckles, back and forth over the numb spot next to his thumb.

He’s just managing to swallow his food when a furious pounding comes through the door. In a second, Bucky’s on his feet, pointing Steve and his mother toward the bedroom that Natasha is already slinking out of, gun in hand.

Abruptly, the pounding stops—then knocking, quieter this time. One-two-three-pause-pause-four-five-pause-six. Steve turns, about to shut the bedroom door, thinking about walking back out at that familiar rhythm; but Bucky waves at him again. He closes the door and presses his ear to it. His mother mirrors him, her small hand tight around his.

_“Where is he?—No, don’t you touch me—I want to know where he goddamn is—”_

Steve’s mother’s mouth opens in shock. Steve pulls her away from the door so he can open it, stumbles into the hallway—

Sam struggles against Bucky’s forearm pinning him to the wall. “Steve, you asshole, tell this fucknut to _let me go_ ,” he snarls.

Pressing harder, Bucky looks over at him, his mouth a tight line. For one inappropriate second, Steve admires the cut of his shoulders, how effortlessly he seems to be holding Sam. “I—Bucky,” he says.

After a second, Bucky eases off, and Sam straightens. “You _asshole_ ,” he says again, already stalking Steve’s direction, and then he’s hugging Steve, squeezing tight enough that Steve knows he’s really mad. “You absolute fucking asshole. Don’t do that again.”

“I won’t,” Steve says. His voice catches in his throat, remembering the voicemail Sam had left him. “I’m sorry. Sam. I’m so sorry.”

He manages to make it out of the hug without crying again, though it’s a close thing, and he’s only kept from it by Sam pulling away and muttering, “God, I’m mad at you. Don’t laugh. I’m angry.” He glares at Natasha, who’s slinking back toward the bedroom. “You could have fucking told us when you dragged us back here last night.”

Steve gapes between them. “She didn’t tell you?”

“We were at your mom’s for dinner when they showed up last night. They wouldn’t even have brought us back here if me and Mrs. R. hadn’t insisted.” Steve’s mother joins them in the hall, and Sam grimaces. “Sorry for all the swearing, Mrs. R.”

She laughs, and after a moment the rest of them join in; if Sam’s and Steve’s voices are a bit wet, nobody mentions it. Only now does Steve notice that Riley is here too, and behind him a blond man drinking coffee out of a bowl. Bucky introduces him as Clint, another agent, then stalks off to the den, clearly still keyed up over Sam’s violent entrance. Clint, looking about as awkward as a human being could be, mumbles something about needing a nap too and scoots past into the bedroom where Natasha’s vanished.

Steve’s mother takes one of Sam’s hands and one of Riley’s and leads them back toward the kitchen. “Have you eaten?” she asks, pointing Steve to sit and go back to his breakfast. Bucky’s plate next to his still has a piece of toast and half his banana, and his coffee, still steaming, milky the way he’d always had it in Madrid.

Once Sam has taken over the brewing of more coffee and Riley has started toasting more raisin bread, Steve’s mom vanishes into the den. Steve thinks about going after her—he doesn’t really trust her not to embarrass him to Bucky—but Riley and Sam are both looking at him like they’re expecting him to talk.

“I—” Steve swallows, looks at his hands. “I got your voicemail, Sam.”

Sam groans and turns back to the coffeemaker. “In my defense, I thought you were dead. You were supposed to be dead. I was—I was _at your grave_.”

“I know.” Steve picks up his banana and fiddles with the peeling edge of its sticker. “I—just wanted to say thanks. For keeping an eye on my mom.” He’s about to say more, can see Sam thinking about saying something too, when Bucky returns with his mother. He and Sam eyeball each other mistrustfully until Steve’s mom nudges Bucky with her elbow.

“Sorry I body-checked you,” Bucky mutters.

Steve bites his lip, making eye contact with Riley, who’s grinning like a loon, and tries not to laugh. Sam, meanwhile, glares at Bucky until Steve’s mom clears her throat pointedly. “I’m sorry I called you a fucknut,” he grumbles. When Steve’s mother waves for him to keep going, he sighs. “Mrs. R., I don’t— _ugh_. Alright, I shouldn’t have tried to knock the door down. Thank you for not shooting me. In my defense—” he squeaks when Steve’s mother elbows him in the ribs—“Come on, Mrs. R. Nobody told us anything until this morning. I think we have a right to be a little upset.”

The two men stare at each other for so long that Steve breaks open his banana and starts to eat it. Finally, his mother picks up Bucky’s right hand and Sam’s right hand and brings them together, forcing them to shake. As soon as she lets them go, they take their hands back, avoiding eye contact with one another.

“Now,” Steve’s mother says, breezing back to her seat, “let’s all sit and finish our breakfasts, shall we? Sam, have you told Steve the big news?”

“What news?” Steve asks, turning in his seat to watch Sam and Riley as they collect their breakfast things and come to sit at the table. “Sam! Riley! What news? Why didn’t you start with it?”

“Genevieve’s having a baby,” Riley tells him. “She’s asked us to be godfathers.”

“What!” Steve turns to Bucky, who is managing to look about as menacing as an angry bear while eating his banana. “Genevieve is Sam’s sister. She got married last year.” Bucky gives him a big, fake grin and a thumbs-up, but Steve ignores the sarcasm. His heart is rising like champagne bubbles, buoyed by the realization that he’s home; he’s _home_ and life may have gone on without him but there’s a space waiting for him here. “I know! That’s so great for her, right?” He turns back to Sam and Riley. “Boy? Girl? What’s the name? When’s it due? Tell me _everything._ ”

 

“So Tony doesn’t know? That I’m still alive?”

Bucky shakes his head. “Don’t think so.”

“They wouldn’t even have told us if I hadn’t refused to let Mrs. R. out of my sight,” Sam points out. “So why the fuck would they tell Tony? It’s not like he’d be in danger or anything.”

“I don’t know if he’d have come willingly, anyway,” Steve points out.

“He’s safe enough there,” Bucky scoffs, glaring at Sam when he makes a disbelieving noise. “The man could launch his own private army with the security he’s got at Stark Tower.” He gives a surly shrug. “Plus he can program that—” he waves a hand at the ceiling—“whatever the hell he calls it. JEREMY. He can program JEREMY to lock the whole building down.”

“JARVIS,” Steve corrects him.

“Yep,” Bucky says, clearly not caring at all. “He’d still be wasting fourteen agents’ time. If they were here, it would only require two agents.” He tips back in his chair, rubbing a hand over the stubble he hadn’t shaved that morning, stubble that Steve has had a hard time taking his eyes off for the last few hours. “Are you ready to talk about the trial?”

Steve is not, really, but he nods anyway. “Um. Sure. Yeah.”

Bucky gets up and heads for the hallway. “Mrs. R., you’ll have to go with these two,” he says over his shoulder. “I’ll get Clint to take you downstairs. Natasha will probably still be asleep.”

Steve’s mother looks, for a moment, like she’s going to argue. The stubborn set of her jaw is so familiar to Steve that he reaches for her hand, hoping to stop that train before it starts. “Ma, please,” he says. “The trial’s confidential. We’ll have dinner together tonight, okay? Just—go with Sam and Riley, please, for now.”

Frowning at him, she stands and takes her teacup to the sink. Steve watches her back as she washes it for far longer than necessary, until Clint returns with Bucky.

“I’ll see you tonight, Ma,” Steve says, standing up and walking over to put a hand on her shoulder. “I promise.”

For a long moment, Steve’s mother looks down into the sink. Then she turns and grabs his wrist, pointing up at him with her other hand. “I won’t lose you again,” she says, low and fierce. “I _won’t_. I swear I will hunt you through the afterlife if I have to.”

He leans down to hug her. She smells just like she always has, like raw hay, somehow, here in the depths of the city. “I’ll see you tonight,” he says again, and turns to Sam and Riley. “You guys too, right?”

“Tonight,” Sam agrees. “As long as your husband doesn’t lock us out.”

Laughing to cover up the squirm in his belly, Steve watches as they go, leaving just himself and Bucky there in the kitchen. Bucky pats the back of a chair and Steve goes with some trepidation. “So,” he says, gripping the chair’s seat.

“So,” Bucky agrees, taking a seat too. “I’ve heard from the department. The trial is scheduled to start tomorrow.”

Steve lets out a slow breath as his head spins a little. That really is not very far away. Tucking his chin to his chest, he breathes through his mouth.

The backs of Bucky’s knuckles rub high on his chest, near his scar. “You’ll be just fine, Steve,” he says, in that soothing voice that seems to be the only thing that’s kept Steve sane these last couple of months. “You walk in, you tell them what you saw, you walk out. That’s all it has to be.”

“And then what?” Steve asks.

Bucky takes his hand back. “And then…” When Steve looks up at him, he’s looking at his hands, folded on the table. “And then they convict and sentence and you go back to your life. Like none of this ever happened.”

Like none of it ever happened. Weeks ago, Steve might have thought that would be nice, if unrealistic. It’s still unrealistic—but there are certain things he’s going to miss desperately. Well. One thing specifically. One thing that’s sitting at this table with him. He looks his fill of Bucky while he still has the chance.

“And I’ll head off on another job,” Bucky says. For once, he’s the one who can’t seem to meet Steve’s eye. Steve considers, for a second, reaching out and taking Bucky’s hand; but then Bucky sits up, pulling his hands off the table and into his lap. “In the meantime, I’ll be right there next to you the whole time. With the one exception of when you’re actually testifying.”

“Have you done that before?”

Now Bucky does look at him. “Have I done what before? Testified?” Steve nods. “No. I’ve seen it before, though.”

“And?” Steve asks. Bucky raises his eyebrows. “And—what’s it like? What kinds of questions will they ask me? Will they believe me?”

“Just flash those big baby blues at them,” Bucky says, reaching out as if he’s going to touch Steve’s face. He stops a few inches from him and sits back. His throat bobs. “Just look at them like you’re looking at me right now, and you’ll be fine. Juries love an earnest witness.”

If Steve looks at the jury like he’s looking at Bucky, he thinks they’ll get more of a witness in love than an earnest witness, but he doesn’t say that. “Where will you be while I’m testifying?”

“It’s a closed court, so they’ll make me wait outside,” Bucky says. Steve swallows; he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to do this without him there to look at. Bucky, it seems, mistakes this for another kind of anxiety and reaches for him again. “Don’t worry, Steve—you’ll be safe in the courtroom. All of the people you’ll be testifying against will be in handcuffs. The security guard will have a taser, but they’ll be the only armed person in the whole building probably.”

“Won’t you?”

“Well—” Bucky grins suddenly—“I’ll have these guns.” He points to his biceps, laughing when Steve snorts. “But, like, not a gun I can shoot. No knives, either. They’ll run everybody through a security check on our way into the building.”

Steve chews on his lip, his nerves already starting to make him nauseous. He doesn’t know how to articulate that.

“I’ll be with you before and after,” Bucky says. “And I’ll be waiting right outside the door while you’re testifying.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll come back here until everyone’s been sentenced, and then—” Bucky licks his lips and shrugs a shoulder, turning to look toward the den. “I’ll probably head off on another assignment. You’ll get to go home.”

For a second, Steve waits, thinking there must be more. “That’s it?” he asks when Bucky doesn’t say anything else. “Will we be safe? Will—will I ever see you again?”

Now Bucky looks up at him, his dark eyes serious, and Steve lets him look, half afraid of what Bucky might see, half wanting him to see it. “I don’t know.” He takes a deep breath like he’s thinking of saying something, then shakes his head. “You’ll have people stopping by, every once in a while. To check on you. Make sure your place hasn’t been compromised. It…might be me. Every once in a while. When I’m not on a job.”

For a second Steve thinks about just saying it; just taking Bucky’s hand and blurting something out about not wanting to lose him. But then the door to the bedroom opens and Natasha appears in the kitchen doorway. Clearing his throat, Bucky nods a greeting to her and gets up. “Might be Nat, sometimes,” he says. “Or Clint.”

Steve fiddles with his sleeve. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Natasha looking between them, an expression on her face that’s eerily similar to Bucky’s mind-reading one.

“Nat, can you go get the others? They went downstairs so we could talk,” Bucky says, his head halfway into the fridge. Steve wonders if he’ll actually take anything out of it, or if it’s just a cover.

“Sure,” she says after a second. “Make me a coffee while I’m down there, would you?”

 

Steve wakes early the morning of the trial, so early he’s pretty sure it’s still dark outside. Bucky is asleep beside him, on his stomach hugging his pillow. For a minute, Steve just looks at him. His hair has grown a bit long in the weeks they’ve known each other, and it curls gently around his ear. Steve reaches out to trace its line, but at the last moment takes his hand away. He lets himself wish, for a moment, that he could be curved so lovingly around Bucky.

He gets up to take a leak and discovers it’s definitely still dark out. The den is empty, Natasha and Steve’s mother back next door. It’s almost eerie.

Although Steve tries to get back in bed quietly and without jostling the mattress too much, Bucky wakes as he’s pulling the covers up. He rolls onto his side and blinks sleepily at Steve. “What time is it?”

Steve looks at him for a moment. In the dark he can barely see Bucky’s eyes, just two narrow reflections like they’re still half-shut. “Early,” he says. “You should go back to sleep.”

“So should you.” Bucky tugs gently at the blankets. “You nervous?”

“Yeah.” In the dark it sounds so bald, nothing to accompany it or distract from it. “Yeah, I am.”

Bucky’s arm drapes over his belly, a comforting weight to ground him. “It will be okay,” Bucky murmurs, his voice near Steve’s ear. “I know it doesn’t help for me to say that, though.”

He’s right, it doesn’t help. But it doesn’t hurt, either. “Thanks.”

Bucky hums a reply, vibrating the air next to Steve’s neck. He barely even twitches. “You’ve done so good, Steve,” Bucky says, and yawns. “You’ve been so good and strong. And it’s almost over. You’re almost through.”

If Steve turned his head right now, they would be kissing. He swallows hard and stares up into the dark, and soon enough, Bucky’s snores are buzzing in his ear once more.

 

If Bucky remembers what he’d said to Steve in the deepest part of the night, he doesn’t show it when they finally get up. He hums off-key while putting peanut butter on a pair of English muffins, switching from Build Me Up Buttercup to Kokomo as he arranges banana slices on top. Steve’s mother crunches on her raisin toast and thanks Steve when he brings her a second mug of tea.

Breakfast is quiet, and Steve only nibbles at his English muffin when Bucky and his mother nudge him to eat. He’s lightheaded with nerves and drinks his coffee only because he knows he’ll get a headache if he doesn’t.

When he finally can’t even bear to pretend to eat anymore, Steve heads off to shower and get dressed. Bucky’s laid out a suit for him on the bed, the navy blue one Steve wears every time one of his friends gets married. Where Bucky got it, Steve doesn’t know, and doesn’t feel like asking right now. There’s even a tie, a matte grey one. Steve fumbles about tying it for about ten minutes before Bucky appears and does it for him, backwards or upside down or something, looking into Steve’s face all the while.

“Well?” Steve asks once he’s done, tugging on his cuff. “How do I look? Earnest enough?”

Bucky’s silent for a few seconds, rocking back on his heels and looking him up and down with no expression whatsoever on his face. Steve tries not to blush, wondering what he’s thinking. “You look great,” he finally says. “You clean up real nice, Steve.”

For a long moment, they just look at each other there in the poorly lit bedroom, close enough to touch. Just when Steve thinks they might actually kiss, Bucky reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small metal disc about the size of a dime. He sticks it behind Steve’s ear, up against his hairline, and presses on it. For a second, Steve’s eyes go dim, then clear. “We’ll have to take this off once we get to the courthouse, but for now you get to look like someone different,” Bucky tells him, then pulls back to examine him for a second. “Hm. I like the real you better. We should get going.”

Steve follows him back to the kitchen, where his mother is standing, looking lost. She, Sam, and Riley will be staying here, where it’s safe. She stares at him as he enters, recoiling when he leans down to kiss her cheek. “Ma,” he says. “It’s me.”

When she looks up into his face, her eyes are wet. “I can’t lose you again,” she whispers. “I _can’t_ , Steve.”

“You won’t.” He takes her hand. “I’ll be back tonight.”

She hugs him fiercely for a moment, then pushes him away. “Protect my boy,” she says to Bucky, who gives her a military salute and opens the front door. They’re in the hall, about to turn down the stairs, when she calls to Steve. He leans his head over the railing to look at her, standing in the doorway to the safehouse. “I don’t like that face.”

Despite the twist of his stomach, he smiles at her. “I’ll make sure to take it off before I get back.”

 

They enter the courthouse through a back door and are brought around to the front to walk through the metal detector. Steve’s hands shake as he buckles his watch back on. Once Bucky walks through—with a few words under his breath to the security guard, a flash of his SHIELD credentials—he pulls Steve into an empty bathroom and locks them together into a stall.

“Uh?” Steve says. He’s dizzy already and can’t imagine a single logical reason for Bucky to do this. Then Bucky reaches up to cup his jaw in his hand—no, to peel the mask device off his skin. “Oh.”

Bucky gives him a tight smile and Steve wonders, suddenly, for the first time all day, if Bucky is nervous. Picking up Steve’s hand, Bucky places something in it and closes his fist around it. Steve looks; it’s a senior alert button like the one Marta had worn all the way back in Madrid. He stares at it, feeling like he’s aged an eternity in the few days it’s been since they left there.

“If things go sideways, you press that,” Bucky tells him, voice low. “You press it, and I’ll come for you.” Steve swallows, tears blurring his hand in front of him, the white button in his palm. Under the throbbing terror of what’s about to happen, of dying in a courtroom trying to do what’s right, there’s something else, another tiny fear, quietly wondering if he’s ever going to see Bucky again when this ends. He sways forward, pressing his face into Bucky’s shoulder, shuddering hard when Bucky wraps both arms tight around him. “I know, Steve,” Bucky whispers, his mouth against Steve’s hair. “This will all be over soon.”

Eventually Steve manages to pull himself together, at least enough to put the alert button in his pocket and straighten up. Bucky’s eyes are concerned on him, and that more than anything makes him stand up tall, pull his shoulders back, put his chin up.

Bucky beams at him, reaches out with both hands to squeeze Steve’s shoulders. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s my boy. Let’s go.”

 

Steve waits in a tiny room off the court to give his testimony. Bucky isn’t allowed in here, so it’s just him and a security guard. Twice he nearly hyperventilates, focusing so hard on his breathing that he overthinks and forgets how to do it properly. His shoulder is aching by the time he’s called to the stand. He doesn’t know or can’t remember the face of the person who shot him, but his body doesn’t seem to care. It clearly wants no part of any of this, none of the eyes on him.

Trying not to shuffle on the carpeted floor, to stand up straight and look both competent and serious, he follows the security guard past the judge’s stand and steps onto the witness stand. He is asked to swear on a Bible that he can’t feel under his palm.

He doesn’t know what the lawyer asks or what he tells the court. For all he knows, he might be speaking gibberish. He tries, like Bucky’d told him, to look at the jury’s faces and into the eyes of the lawyer. He wonders if he looks earnest the way Bucky had seen the other day.

The defendant—the barista Steve had ordered from, all those weeks ago, maybe, though he doesn’t quite remember if this is how the man looked then—is dressed in a suit at least as nice as Steve’s, his tie starkly black against the white of his shirt. His mouth is a thin line as he watches Steve talk, and Steve falters, turns to face the jury again. In the front row there’s a man with dark hair and eyes steady on Steve. If he lets his eyes blur out a little, it could be Bucky.

Suddenly it becomes easy, sort of looking at that man. The words spill out of him like sunlight through a window in the morning. How he’d been trying to find a paint that would match the color of his mother’s eyes or at least something he could mix. How he’d lost track of time in an art shop in DUMBO and emerged into the sun with a caffeine headache the size of an elephant standing on his head. How he’d decided that the line at Starbucks was too long and ducked instead into what he’d thought was an as-yet undiscovered hipster coffee shop on a side street. How the baristas had exchanged a look as he’d walked in, and another when he’d ordered a drip coffee. How he’d thought it had been because of his coffee order.

The crunch of shattered ceramic under his feet. The espresso machine exploding.

Blood.

And white—maybe that’s what he remembers most. The white slash of pain through his shoulder and down his arm. White light directly in his eyes and the white fog of whatever sedative they’d given him. White gloves running into white lab coats, lying on white sheets in white rooms wondering which direction is up.

The water bottle in his hand has gone warm when he finally thinks to take a sip from it. He turns the small white cap of it over and over in his hand and looks up at the lawyer, wondering what he might be asked next. Whether his ears are ringing or it’s just that the silence is beginning to echo, he’s not sure; he swallows and glances back at that man. He doesn’t really look like Bucky at all: his nose too crooked, his eyebrows not thick enough.

“Thank you, Mr. Rogers,” the judge says, looking down at Steve with a thoughtful expression on her face. “The witness is excused.”

The security guard who’d been in the waiting chambers with him walks forward and gestures that he should follow her. He gets up, closing the water bottle, and stumbles after her, through the door in the corner that leads back to the chambers.

“Now what?” he asks. The empty room is painted yellow. He hadn’t noticed before. The wingback he’d been sitting on earlier is soft-looking and dove grey and he reaches out to touch it, expecting the crispness of cotton warmed by a Spanish sun, expecting a cathedral’s gilded incense smell.

It’s fuzzy and warm, more like a flannel than a dress shirt.

“You’re free to go,” the security guard says. “You’ve got someone here waiting for you, don’t you?” Steve nods, and she turns to the door to the hall. “I’ll get him. You wait here.”

Steve stands in the room touching the armchair, not really thinking much. He still can’t really feel his lips, or his feet, come to think of it. It could be seconds or an hour before the door opens again; he turns to find Bucky shutting the door behind him, closing them in to this small room.

Bucky is beside him in a moment, his hand cupping Steve’s elbow. “How did it go?” he asks, examining Steve’s face closely. “You didn’t panic on me, huh?”

“No.” Steve reaches into his pocket and holds out the panic button.

Tucking the thing away, Bucky procures the little mask device again. This time he does cup his hands at Steve’s jaw, looking at him as he sticks the thing behind his ear. Steve looks back at him, waiting for the shadow to pass over his eyes, but it doesn’t. “How did it go?” Bucky asks again.

Steve licks his lips. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t remember.”

Bucky snorts and his thumb nudges the spot behind Steve’s ear. His eyes go dark for a second and then light again. “It’s been a long day already,” he says. “Come on. Let’s get you back to your mom.”

They’re in the car when Steve thinks of it, looking out the window watching the city pass them by. “Hey,” he says. Bucky hums a question, not taking his eyes off the road. “Um, can we stop for something to eat?”

“What are you thinking you want?”

Steve shrugs. “Nothing special. I just—a real American milkshake sounds really nice right now, you know?”

Reaching over, Bucky runs a hand through his hair. “I think we can probably arrange that, yeah,” he says. “You’ll have to finish it before we get back to the safehouse, though. I told your mom we wouldn’t dawdle on our way back.”

Steve laughs; and now that he’s started he can’t stop. It’s over. He’d made it through the trial. Bucky grins over at him, and he takes a breath, his lungs half-hitching. In another few weeks Bucky will be gone—once the jury produces a verdict Bucky will have no reason to keep an eye on him anymore, and he’ll walk off with another client and Steve will have to become used to sleeping alone again.

Bucky’s still smiling. Steve fiddles again with the cap on the water bottle he’d taken from the courthouse without really realizing and doesn’t look up until Bucky pulls the car over. “This place is like a Model T,” Bucky says, grinning when Steve looks up, completely confused. “An American classic. C’mon.”

 

Sipping on his triple-chocolate strawberry shake, Steve watches as Bucky performs the code knock—one-two-three-pause-pause-four-five-pause-six—and then sticks his key into the lock. He smiles, lips closed, still chewing on chunks of actual strawberry, when Bucky looks back at him, unlocking the door at the same time.

“Wait,” Bucky says, and turns, letting go of the key to reach behind Steve’s ear and unstick the mask disc. “Your mom said.”

“Thanks.”

They look at each other for a second. “Yeah, I like your face better,” Bucky finally says, then pushes open the door. “Mrs. R.? We’re—”

But she’s already in the hall waiting for them, her hands loosening from the knots Steve knows she’s been holding them in. “I made it,” he tells her.

She doesn’t say anything; just walks over and squeezes him so tight around the middle that he can briefly feel her trembling. Then she turns to look at Bucky. “You said you’d come straight back,” she says. It sounds like an accusation, but her voice is a little too thick, a little too shaky.

Putting up both hands in surrender, one of them occupied by his coffee chocolate chip shake, Bucky gestures at Steve. “Blame him. He wanted to stop for milkshakes after.”

Steve sticks his tongue out at Bucky and settles an arm around his mother’s shoulders. “Sorry, Ma.” She pinches him. “Ow! Hey, I said I was sorry.”

“And while you were getting a milkshake, we were here fretting about whether or not you were even _alive_ ,” she says.

“Ma, yeah, I know, I’m sorry,” Steve grumbles. “But I am alive, okay? Can I go and change now?” He makes a face at Bucky as he walks past, closing himself into the bedroom and putting his milkshake down on the dresser.

He kicks off his shoes and takes off his jacket, unties his tie and fumbles at the cuffs of his shirt until they finally open. Belt, socks, pants. It’s as he gets his undershirt over his head that his eyes hit the bed and his whole body reminds him of how early he’d woken that morning. He yawns, feeling it all the way in his toes, and heeds its siren song, crawling into bed and wrapping himself around a pillow.

 

A hand pushes its way through Steve’s hair, and he snaps awake, sitting up and knocking Bucky’s arm away. “Wuh—” he grits his teeth, shaking off the white fog of his dream, and blinks at Bucky in the dimness of the bedroom.

“Sorry.” Bucky folds his hands in his lap, watching as Steve relaxes a little. “We decided to let you sleep for a few hours. I just thought you might be hungry—it’s almost dinner time.”

“Oh.” Shutting his eyes again, Steve rolls his head on his neck, rubs a hand through his hair like he can finish Bucky’s action. It’s not really quite the same. “Thanks. Yeah. I’ll—”

Bucky’s eyes are on the scar puckering the skin of Steve’s shoulder. When Steve trails off, resisting the urge to violently jerk the sheet up to cover himself, Bucky looks back at Steve’s face. “Sorry. I—sorry. I hadn’t seen it before this. I’ll—take your time getting up. I helped your mom make a roast beef.”

Steve watches as Bucky gets up and leaves, pulling the door shut behind him. For a long few seconds, Steve considers staying in bed, not quite wanting to look at Bucky’s face now that he’s seen the scar; but his stomach protests the idea, growling aggressively. He can smell the roast.

Throwing back the sheets, he gets out of bed, pulling on his undershirt and sweats and shuffling out to the kitchen. Besides his mother and Bucky, Sam and Riley are there too, and Natasha. There’s a bottle of champagne chilling and potatoes and vegetables on the table, the roast waiting to be carved.

“You’ll do that, won’t you?” Steve’s mother asks, pointing at the roast with the fork she’s using to stir the gravy. “You always do a better job than me.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, breathless and a little teary with all of this, with the smell of a roast that his mother has made, with her asking him to carve, with the little party here to welcome him back to his life. Walking over to his mom, he wraps both arms around her, tight, and leans down to plant a kiss on her cheek. “I love you, Ma.”

She elbows him. “You’ll make me spill the gravy,” she says, but she’s smiling. “And it’s time to carve the beast.”

Despite her squeaky protests, he squeezes her one more time before obeying.

 

Bucky’s sitting on their bed shirtless, the shades already shut tight, when Steve comes in after brushing his teeth. He’s fiddling with his night shirt with both hands, but when Steve enters, he looks up. “Hey,” Steve says, because Bucky doesn’t seem ready to open a conversation.

“Hi.” In the quiet, Steve can hear Bucky swallow. He gets up, leaving the shirt behind, and walks a couple steps closer. “Um. Can I show you something?”

“I. Yeah. Sure.”

Bucky reaches over his left shoulder with his right hand. His face twitches, his head jerking to the left as if he doesn’t quite have control over the motion. With a flicker, the cloaking on his arm vanishes, leaving Steve to see, finally, his prosthetic arm.

It’s made of some kind of silver metal, reflecting the gentle lamplight of the room across the plates of it. Steve can’t stop looking at the scarring that webs across Bucky’s chest and up toward his neck. Dull red and angular, it looks like the kind of thing that might still hurt on cold days. One scar stretches almost all the way to his sternum.

Reaching out, Steve manages to stop himself from touching Bucky’s skin.  He floats his hand over Bucky’s chest, close enough to feel the warmth of his body, and over his shoulder. “You can—” Bucky says, his voice soft. He holds his hand out, palm up, to Steve. “If you want.”

Steve swallows and hesitates for a second, then brushes his fingers over Bucky’s palm. The metal is cooler than skin but warmer than he’d expected, the plates smooth with dull edges. Under his touch, Bucky’s fingers twitch. “Can you—can you feel that?”

“Yeah.”

When Steve looks up, Bucky’s eyes are on him, steady and serious. His lips are parted, his breath a little too fast to be normal. The champagne must be going to Steve’s head; that’s the only reason, he’s sure, that he’s a little dizzy, that his brain doesn’t stop him when he leans in and presses his mouth to Bucky’s.

He jerks back as soon as he realizes what he’s done; but Bucky follows, his metal hand closing on Steve’s, the other sliding up the back of his neck and holding him in place. His thumb strokes at that sensitive spot behind Steve’s ear and Steve melts, swaying in, tipping his head a little so that Bucky can get closer.

For a moment, Steve ignores the voice in his head telling him that this is a terrible idea. Instead he lets himself have this, kisses Bucky for what he’s sure is the last time—kisses him goodbye. Bucky’s metal hand lets go of his, wrapping around his waist until they’re pressed flush from their mouths to their knees. Steve lets his hand rest on his metal shoulder. The mechanics under the plates start to whir.

Losing himself to it, he barely notices that he’s almost out of breath. It’s only when Bucky dips his head that Steve realizes he needs oxygen. He keeps his eyes shut, trying to commit this to memory, the smell of Bucky, the gentle way he cups Steve’s jaw, his heat all along Steve’s front.

Finally he gulps and opens his eyes. Bucky doesn’t look at him as he loosens his grip. “We—” Bucky clears his throat, licks his lips—“We should. Go to bed. It’s…it’s late.”

Steve bites his lip. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah. Um. It’s been a long day.”

“It has, yeah.” Bucky lets go of him, his fingers trailing down Steve’s arm. “I—I forgot to get a water glass. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He leaves Steve standing there in the bedroom, trying to collect himself. On numb feet, he gets into bed. Lying down, he pulls the covers up to his chin and closes his eyes, wondering if Bucky would believe that he’s fallen asleep already so they don’t have to talk any more tonight.

Whether or not Steve is convincing, Bucky doesn’t disturb him when he returns. Steve listens as he shuts the door and puts his water glass down, as he sits on the bed and flips off the light. In the dark and the quiet, he lies down, and Steve hears him sigh. If he weren’t so intent on pretending to be asleep, Steve might do the same.

 

Steve had been hoping to savor his last few days with Bucky. But suddenly the days seem to be running past: the jury declares a verdict, the many Hydra agents, including the one Steve’d testified against and the one who’d shot him, are remanded to prison, and arrangements are made for Steve to move back to Red Hook with his mother. The apartment he’d rented in Crown Heights is gone, somehow, though he doesn’t ask the details. He’d thought about moving back to it, but he tells people that he’d missed his mother too much. It isn’t a lie, but it isn’t the whole truth; he’s become so used to having another person nearby that he doesn’t think he’s ready to go back to living alone.

He and Bucky seem never to be alone together again, except for when they’re going to sleep. Even then, it seems like Bucky will barely look at him, barely acknowledge the last few months they’ve spent together. He’s pulling away and Steve knows it, wants to stop him and wants to let it happen at the same time.

Red Hook is pretty much just as he remembers it, his mother’s apartment exactly the same but for several boxes of the stuff he’d had at his place. He moves his suitcase into his childhood bedroom and stands there in the doorway, looking in, for a long time.

“Hey.”

When Steve looks around, Bucky is standing behind him, peering over his shoulder into the bedroom. “Hey,” Steve replies.

“So this is where you grew up,” Bucky says.

Steve nods. “This is where the magic happened.”

“Magic, huh?” Bucky asks, his eyes sly on Steve, who braces himself for what he’s going to say next. “So this is where that first box of condoms got used?”

Unable to help himself, Steve cracks up. Bucky starts to laugh, too, sidling past him and throwing himself onto the twin-sized bed. “Ah yes,” he says, looking at the ceiling, “I can feel it. I can feel the magic.”

Steve doubles over, trying not to snort. Bucky grabs his hand and yanks him onto the bed with him. It’s not big enough; he ends up sprawled across Bucky, both of them still cackling.

Trying to ignore the small part of his mind that’s reminding himself that this is the end, Steve lets his mood untether itself, rise like a hot air balloon on a cold morning. He has his life back. Bucky may not be in it; but Steve can’t deny that he’s looking forward to returning to it, with Bucky or no.

But eventually they calm down. Steve lies there, Bucky’s arms keeping him from sliding off onto the floor. Even with his back to Bucky, he can hear him swallow. “This was a good assignment,” Bucky says, his voice next to Steve’s ear. “I liked being your fake husband, Steve. You’re going to make someone a great real husband someday.”

Steve looks up at the ceiling and lets out a long slow breath. “I.” He doesn’t know what to say that won’t totally betray him, but that will still express his gratitude. “Thank you,” he finally says. “For keeping me safe.”

They lie there for a few more moments. Steve doesn’t know what Bucky’s thinking, but he can’t stop trying to puzzle out something else to say, something that will tell Bucky he’s going to miss him without being weird about it. Before he gets a chance to think of anything, his mother calls them to the kitchen.

She’s already got a pot on for tea, though they can’t have been back for more than twenty minutes. Looking at the kettle, an ancient blue one that she’s had since Steve can remember, and smelling the strong Irish breakfast tea she’s always gotten from some European shop in Manhattan, Steve lets out a low breath. He’s so glad to be home that it actually hurts.

“Sit,” his mother says, pointing at the small table in the corner where Steve had eaten every breakfast until he’d gone to college.

Steve goes without even thinking, but when he notices that Bucky’s not following, he turns and looks at him where he’s hesitating in the doorway. “I should,” Bucky says, gesturing toward the door, “I should let you guys get settled. Let you—get, you know, back to your life.”

For a long second, none of them speak. Bucky isn’t looking at Steve but at the floor somewhere near his left foot. He watches as Bucky scuffs a toe along the linoleum, but it isn’t he who speaks. “You’re welcome here,” Steve’s mother says. “You saved my boy. You’re always welcome here.”

Finally, Bucky looks up, but at her, not at Steve. “Thanks, Mrs. R.,” he says. “I’ll. I’ll come by, sometime. To check on you guys.”

Steve watches as Bucky walks over and hugs his mom. After a second, Bucky lets her go and turns to Steve, his face somber. “Thank you,” Steve says, before he really knows what he means to say. “I. I wouldn’t be here without you.”

Bucky gives a wan smile. Some small part of Steve wonders if all of his goodbyes are like this. “Sure you would,” Bucky says. “If it wasn’t me, it probably would have been Natasha. And I don’t know if you know this, but she can strangle a person with her feet.”

Steve laughs, but it’s a weak thing. He can feel his mother’s eyes on him, but he doesn’t look at her, too busy looking at Bucky, committing every freckle, every laughline to memory. “But if it hadn’t been you, who would’ve showed me all those museums?”

“I’m sure you’ve had gotten on,” Bucky says. “C’mere.” He reaches for Steve, and Steve goes, squeezing him as tight as he’s being squeezed. “I’ll see you soon, Steve.”

Nodding into his shoulder, Steve holds on for just a second longer than he knows he should. He doesn’t look at Bucky, and he’s pretty sure Bucky’s not looking at him, when they part. “Goodbye, Bucky.”

“Bye, Steve.” Bucky runs a hand through Steve’s hair, one last time.

And then he’s gone.

He stands there for a long time, looking at the place where Bucky’d been. Eventually, the kettle screams, breaking him from his thoughts. He watches his mother as she pours boiling water into the white china teapot she’d always used, helps her bring the cups and the milk to the table. He even sits and prepares his tea.

“I liked him,” his mother finally says.

“Yeah.” Steve cups both hands around his tea. Its color is similar to that of the milky coffee Bucky drank all those mornings on their balcony in Madrid. “Yeah, me too.”

 

The sixth morning since they’ve been back, Steve still wakes expecting to feel Bucky at his side, expecting to roll over and encounter his warm body. Instead, he rolls and hits the edge of his kneecap on the wall next to his bed. Groaning, his knee tingling, he curls up, nearly falling off the other side of his bed as he does.

He rolls back over and pushes a pillow behind him, then presses his back to the pillow and the pillow to the wall. It’s not really the same as having an actual human there, but in some morbid way Steve’s glad it isn’t. Waking up this way is so terrible that all he wants to do is wallow in it, press on the bruise and sit in pain until it fades.

He manages to drop back off to sleep for a little while, and once he wakes again he stays in bed until his caffeine headache is too bad to ignore.

His mother is packing a lunch when he enters the kitchen. He pours himself a cup of coffee and watches, sipping at it, while she puts her bag by the door and sits to put on her shoes. “Will you go to the shops?” she asks. “We’ll need some things for supper. And I think we’re out of milk.”

“Sure.”

She gets up and walks over to him, and he leans down obligingly so she can kiss his cheek. “Don’t mope about all day,” she tells him. “Or if you do—open a window, won’t you? I don’t want it steeping in here. Smells bad.”

“Yes, Ma.” Steve follows her to the door, lets her out, locks it behind her. Coffee in hand, he shuffles into the living room, opens the big bay window, and curls up on the couch, prepared to turn on some terrible TV and stay there all day.

He’s barely ten minutes into the latest episode of _House Hunters_ when someone knocks on the door. Grumbling to himself, he gets up, taking the throw blanket with him like a cape around his shoulders.

It’s Sam, a box of crullers under his arm. Steve—very considerately, he thinks, given that he’d thought about taking the pastries and telling Sam to get lost—mutes the television. Sam doesn’t press him until he’s two crullers deep.

“So…your mom called,” he says. Steve glares and stuffs half a cruller into his mouth. “Wow, god, I forgot how _the worst_ you are when you’re pining.”

“Fuck you,” Steve snaps, though the effect is somewhat dampened by how mangled the words come out. He intensifies his glare, hoping that will make up for it.

It doesn’t seem to. Sam grins at him. “Now that’s not really what you want, is it?”

Steve squirms around in his seat so he’s facing the TV and not Sam. The woman on _House Hunters_ is gesturing to the cracked and peeling paint on the crown molding, and Steve fiddles with the edge of his blanket. “You want to go to the grocery store with me?” he asks eventually. “My mom needs milk.”

“Sounds thrilling,” Sam says, but he’s already getting up. He gathers the pink paper napkins and holds the crullers box out. “Have one more. I’ll get the bags while you get changed.”

Out in the sunshine, Steve feels somewhat better. Sam tells him about Riley’s shenanigans with the newest addition to the menagerie of animals he’s convinced Sam to adopt. This time it’s a canary who can’t stand the construction sounds from the site near them and screeches from dawn to dusk. It sounds to Steve like Sam is just as enamored with it as Riley.

“Who took care of the zoo while you were gone?” Steve asks, suddenly. “While—I mean. While we were. You know.”

Sam side-eyes him, smirking as he flounders. “Did you already forget that Mr. Reyes from next door always watches the beasts while we’re on vacation?” He shakes his head. “Poor old Steve. So forgetful. Have you tried gingko for that?”

Laughing, Steve shoves him a couple of steps sideways. “Two months,” he says. “ _Two months_ is all you’ve got on me.”

“Pardon me, but it’s two and a half.” Sam shoulders him back, and Steve loops an arm around his to keep himself from stumbling into the street.

“Whatever, bird man,” Steve grumbles.

They walk on for a few minutes in silence. It’s warm today, but not outrageously hot, and Steve is able to keep his arm in Sam’s as they walk without getting too sweaty. As they stop in at a coffee shop, Sam gives him a speculative look.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Sam says, shrugging and turning to look at the menu. Then he turns back to Steve. “Actually, yeah. What is it about him that you miss so bad?”

Feeling a blush creep up the back of his neck, Steve stares at the menu. “I—” he pauses, thinking about it. “I just. He was really good to me.”

Sam raises an eyebrow at him. “That’s what he was paid to do, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I know, Sam, thanks.” Stepping up to the counter, Steve orders for both of them—they always pretend to check the menu and always get the same thing, a cappuccino for Steve and a mocha latte for Sam—and pays, and leaves a little extra tip because he knows he’s a bit snappish. He takes the walk over to their usual table to think.

“He’s funny,” he tells Sam as they sit. “And smart. And good at his job. And—and I spent every minute of every day with him for two whole months. Doesn’t that entitle me to miss having him around?”

For a minute, Sam just looks at him, and it occurs to Steve that maybe he has too many mind-reading friends. Or maybe he just isn’t very good at hiding his emotions. “Yeah,” Sam finally says. “Yeah, I guess it does.”

 

Steve returns to his shop midway through an afternoon, sketchbook under his arm. There’s a knot in his throat as he pushes open the door, the little bell jangling overhead. They know he’s alive—Bucky’d told him that they’d been informed a few days previous—but he hasn’t yet had any contact with Thor or Helen.

As he lets the door swing shut behind him, Thor straightens up from where he’s sketching something at the front desk. His mouth opens a little in shock. Steve tries on a smile.

“Helen,” Thor calls. He stares at Steve another moment before slowly making his way around the desk. “Steve.”

Steve is no longer small as he’d been as a boy, no longer weightless on breezy days. But Thor still dwarfs him when he wraps both arms around him, squeezing until Steve gasps for breath. It might have been a factor in Steve’s decision to sleep with him last year.

Breathless, Steve hugs him back. His brain suggests a flirtatious comment, a _have you gotten stronger since I’ve been away?_ Sam had suggested it, too, suggested he have a rebound fling when he’d come over the day before. There’s even some part of him that thinks it might be a good idea, something that would help put Bucky out of his mind. And Thor, he knows, would be a fine choice: Steve knows from experience that they’ll have a good time; and that Thor will take it for a fling without complicating things.

Sighing, Steve lets him go. It wouldn’t be fair to Thor. He doesn’t even think he wants it, anyway.

When he turns, Helen’s standing there, eyes wide. “Jesus,” she says. “Welcome back, asshole.”

“Thanks,” Steve says. He hugs her too and manages to laugh because Thor’s freely crying. “I guess I don’t need to ask if you guys missed me, huh?”

Laughing, Thor wipes at his eyes. “You look well,” he says, inspecting Steve with a critical eye. “We weren’t expecting to see you for another few weeks.”

“Couldn’t sit around the house any longer, you know?” Steve puts his sketchbook on the front desk and looks around the shop. It looks just the way he remembers, just the way he’d set it up: front desk on the left, first station on the right, by the window. Stairs up and two more stations up there. “It’s…so good to be back.”

“Does this mean you’re ready to start taking appointments again?” Helen asks. “Not that I don’t love what I do or anything, but it’s starting to wear every time someone tells me they miss you while they’re under my needle.”

“Sorry.” He looks around. “I didn’t interrupt a session, did I?”

She checks her watch. “My next appointment should be in soon. I was just getting my station prepped.”

“I haven’t booked you anything,” Thor tells him. “I didn’t know when you’d be coming back.”

Steve shakes his head. “That’s fine. I—I just thought I could come by. Maybe take a few pictures for Instagram. Sketch for a bit. You know?”

Thor grins at him. “It’s your shop. I think you’re allowed to do whatever you’d like.”

He watches as Steve fiddles with the chair in the front window, tipping it to a better angle and then pushing the arm down so he’ll have something to lean on. Steve looks up, around the shop and then out the window at the little café across the street. “I’m going to grab a coffee,” he says. “You want one, Thor? Helen?”

“Yeah, you do owe me a coffee,” Helen calls from her station upstairs. “Get me a caramel mocha.”

“Have you been holding onto that debt this whole time?” he calls back to her, heading for the door.

“Absolutely. It was just a regular coffee before, but I’m charging interest these days. Chop chop, Steve—I’ve got a client on their way in as we speak.”

 

It’s surreal, coming back. Steve supposes that he’d expected to have trouble settling back in; but it feels like no time at all before he’s back to work more or less full-time, coming home in the evenings to have dinner and watch _Scandal_ reruns with his mother.

The first time someone knocks the code on their door—one-two-three-pause-pause-four-five-pause-six—since they’ve been home, Steve checks the peephole to see a familiar redhead waiting outside. He ignores the sinking of his stomach and lets Natasha in.

His mother, lying on the couch with her feet up on the armrest, still in her scrubs, looks around when Steve ushers Natasha into the living room. “Tea?” he asks. Both women nod, so he goes to put the kettle on, and when he returns, Nat is sitting in the armchair listening to his mother talk about her shift.

She watches as Steve crosses to the other chair and takes it. “How are things? Are you back to work?”

“Yeah,” he tells her. “About two weeks, now. And you? You must be between jobs, huh?”

“Got back last night,” she tells them. “SHIELD wanted to send someone you knew the first time.”

Steve nods and pointedly doesn’t ask about Bucky. “And things are still safe?”

The grin that Natasha gives is sharp, like she knows he’s keeping himself from asking something else. “You’d have seen someone already if they weren’t.”

“How is James?” Steve’s mother asks. He thanks her, in his head, for helping him save face.

“I don’t know.” Steve looks up at Natasha, curled up in what had been his father’s favorite armchair like she belongs there. “He’s on another job. I don’t know where, so don’t ask,” she says, and Steve doesn’t even pretend he hadn’t been thinking about it. He feels sick just thinking about Bucky holding hands with some faceless figure, flirting with that person in the kitchen of their little apartment in Madrid. Logically, he’s sure that apartment has been scrubbed, maybe sold back to civilians. It doesn’t stop him from imagining. “It sounded like an extraction rather than a protection detail, but I don’t know for sure.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Extractions don’t usually take as long as protection details. He’ll probably be back in town in a couple of weeks. It depends on how risky the extraction is, how deeply hidden the person is.” The image in Steve’s head of Bucky kissing on someone in the dappled sunlight of Retiro Park dissolves. “He should be home soon, I think.”

Steve doesn’t look at her, hating how perceptive she is, wondering if she’d learned it from Bucky or vice versa, or if this was part of their training or just something you had to be good at to get this job. Luckily he’s saved by the screech of the kettle, and he leaves the living room gladly.

Shutting off the stove, he prepares a teapot and pours out the hot water. While it steeps he prepares a tray with three teacups, milk, sugar, and the teapot, but before he brings it back to the other room he takes a second to lean against the fridge and breathe. It’s insane to be jealous of whoever is in enough danger to need extracting, and he knows it, but he can’t help himself. He misses Bucky like hell, has missed him every night since moving back here and every morning waking up, and all the daytimes in between.

After a minute, his mother calls out to him and he realizes he’s been standing in the kitchen for a suspiciously long time, lost in daydreams about Bucky’s mouth on his. “Yeah,” he calls, and picks up the tray. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

 

Steve flicks through his sketchbook, looking for a blank page. He’s supposed to be working on a tattoo for a woman, some kind of big colorful bird perched on a magnolia branch. Instead his sketchbook is full of sketch after sketch of Bucky’s face, his hands, the shiny metal of his arm. Sighing, he flips the book shut and opens it from the back, where it’s all blank pages and he doesn’t have to look at Bucky.

He puts his pencil tip to paper, starting with the curve of the bird’s head. He doesn’t look up when the door chimes, not allowing himself to start on a duck that he could paint onto Bucky’s prosthesis.

Thor knocks on the partition between Steve’s station and Helen’s. “One sec,” Steve says, not looking up from his sketchbook, wanting to finish the twist of the bird’s neck, the transition from head to body.

“There’s someone here to see you,” Thor tells him when he finally looks up. “New client, I think.”

“Send them up.” Steve vacates the client chair, tidying up his workbench a little so he can put his sketchbook down. He throws away a few empty needle packages and moves some ink bottles toward the back of the counter. He closes his sketchbook, moving the pencil into his pen cup before finally turning.

“Hey.”

Steve stares. Somehow he hadn’t expected it to be Bucky, but here he is, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, chewing on the corner of his mouth. In his cloaked left hand he holds a bouquet of daisies.

“Bucky,” Steve says, the only word his shocked brain can come up with.

With a smile, Bucky sticks his free hand into his pocket. “Hey, Steve,” he says again. “Are you…you’re not busy, are you? Your—the guy up front said you don’t have an appointment for another hour or something.”

“I’m…if he says so, it must be true.” For all that Steve’s thought about this moment, wished desperately to see Bucky again, now that he’s here he has no idea what to say. He licks his lips, looking again at the daisies because Bucky’s looking at him with that penetrating stare and he knows exactly what he must look like right now.

“Oh. Um. I bought these. For your mom,” Bucky says, holding out the flowers to him.

Steve looks around. “My mom doesn’t really come here very often.” Still, he takes the flowers and looks around. “I’ll—I’ll put them in some water and—and then I’ll bring them home tonight.”

“Right.” Bucky scratches at the back of his hair and sticks both hands into his pockets. “Sorry. I should have thought.” Shifting his weight back to his other foot, he squints a little at Steve. “You want to—can we go for a walk?”

“Of course. Let me just,” Steve says. He looks around, wondering if he has anything at all that might work as a makeshift vase. His pen cup is an old mason jar; emptying it, he heads for the bathroom to rinse and fill it. When he returns, Bucky is unwrapping the flowers. Steve holds out the jar and Bucky puts the stems into it, and for a moment they stand there looking at each other over them.

Helen’s needle stops running behind the partition. Cutting his eyes away, Steve puts the daisies down on his worktop and turns the jar until the nicest side of them faces out. “Shall we?” he asks, turning and gesturing for Bucky to lead the way down the stairs.

They don’t speak again until they’re out in the heat, around the corner from the shop. “How have you been?” Bucky asks as they turn into the shade on the east side of the block.

“Fine, yeah, fine,” Steve says, watching the traffic instead of looking at Bucky. If he does, he’s afraid he’ll just start rambling about how much he misses him. “How was—you know, how was your last job? Nat said it was an extraction?”

“Went fine.” From the corner of his eye, Steve can see Bucky shrug. “I—um, I put in a transfer request.”

Steve actually cricks his neck turning to look at him. “You did? To where? You’re leaving New York?”

“No—that’s not what I meant.” Glancing around, Bucky pulls him out of the flow of foot traffic, up against the side of a building. “I just—I meant. I don’t want to do any more undercover jobs. Extractions are more straightforward. Shorter. And it means I don’t have to—well. It means I won’t have to pretend to be married to anyone anymore.”

Even though he’s pretty sure Bucky can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, Steve looks away from him. “Oh. Yeah. I guess that was probably. Probably pretty hard.”

He can feel Bucky’s eyes on him, but he doesn’t look back. For a long second, they stand there, Steve struggling to breathe. How much had Bucky hated their time together, if it was the one to cause him to ask for a transfer?

Bucky puts a hand on his elbow, tugging at him. His other hand on Steve’s jaw, he pulls his face around so that Steve is forced to look at him. “Steve, you fuckin’ idiot,” he mutters. Steve blinks at him. “I put in for a transfer because I got way too deep with you. I did a bad job.”

Some tiny part of Steve cracks open, allows itself to hope. “I made it back alive,” he points out. His voice is hoarse.

Sighing discontentedly, Bucky takes Steve’s face in both his hands. “You’re not hearing me, Steve. I can’t go undercover anymore because I can’t pretend I want to kiss any of those people. It would be too hard when all I can think about is kissing _you_.”

“You—what?” Steve’s brain goes into overdrive, producing nothing except a frantic buzzing. He stares at Bucky, his mouth hanging open, at a complete loss for anything to say or think or do.

Bucky licks his lips and his face goes uncertain. He lets go of Steve, takes half a step back. “Unless. I—I shouldn’t have said that,” he says. “I. You don’t. You don’t feel the same.”

A panicked laugh claws its way up Steve’s throat and out his mouth. “You can’t be serious,” he says, giggling, unable to stop. He grabs Bucky’s arm. “Jesus H. Christ, Bucky, are you blind?” Grabbing the front of Bucky’s shirt, Steve drags him in.

This first kiss is less than perfect; their noses hit one another painfully, and their mouths don’t line up quite right. Bucky pulls back for a second and stares at him. Steve waits—then, finally, Bucky steps back in, tips his head, slowly and deliberately lines his mouth up with Steve’s.

Bucky is warm and smells just like he always has, his hand landing on Steve’s hip and sliding back to rest in the dip of his spine. His tongue brushes Steve’s lips and Steve sighs, letting go of his shirt. Bucky leans hard against him, pressing his back into the scratchy, uneven brick he’s leaning against.

They both jump when Steve’s phone goes off in his pocket, vibrating against both their thighs. “Sorry,” Steve mumbles as Bucky pulls back a little. He worms his hand into his pocket. “Sorry, sorry.”

Bucky leans in and kisses at the place where Steve’s jaw meets his ear. “You have to go, don’t you?”

It’s a text from Thor, telling him that his next appointment has arrived. “Fuck,” Steve sighs, his lips rubbing up against Bucky’s stubble. It’s distracting, to say the least. “Fuck. Yes, yeah. I have to get back to the shop.”

Bucky sticks his face into Steve’s neck and sighs, his breath making Steve squirm. “Fine.” He backs up, but not enough to let Steve move. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, yeah, anything.” Steve tips his sunglasses up, props them on top of his head. The sun is so bright he has to squint.

Bucky’s got that mind-reading look on again, his mouth twisting curiously. “How long?” he asks.

“Bucky.” Steve actually has to smile. “I’ve been thinking about kissing you every second of every day ever since you kissed my hand on our flight to Madrid.”

Someone jostles Bucky as they walk past; he moves back in, closer to Steve. “That long?” he asks. When Steve nods, Bucky reaches up, runs his thumb along the shell of Steve’s ear. “It must have been torture, all those weeks.”

Steve half-shrugs. “I still got to spend all that time kissing you,” he says. “Even if it was all fake.”

They aren’t speaking loudly; Bucky’s face is near his, so close Steve can feel the puff of his breath. “It wasn’t,” Bucky murmurs. “It…it wasn’t. Not after that first trip to the Prado when you stood in the Goya exhibit for three hours and then made me go back because you wanted to see it again.”

Unable to help himself, Steve laughs. Bucky grins, too. “Can you blame me?” he asks. “They’re masterpieces, Bucky. _Masterpieces_.”

Bucky leans in, his thumb stroking over Steve’s lower lip. “I was busy looking at a different masterpiece.” He eyeballs Steve meaningfully. “I’m talking about you. You’re the masterpiece.”

Steve snorts, wrapping an arm around Bucky’s neck. “That’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard,” he tells him. “And you didn’t even need to use it. You already got me, Bucky.”

“I did?”

Tilting his head, Steve plants another kiss on him, imperfect, their lips only half-lining up. “Yeah,” he says, soft against Bucky’s skin. “You did. You _do_ , Bucky.”

Both of Bucky’s arms wrap around Steve’s waist, their bodies pressed tight together. “Good,” he mumbles. “That’s good. _Shit_ , I missed you.”


End file.
